🥥 Vegetarian food in Oceania

This is the smallest section on the site, and it is better said plainly: Oceania is thinly documented outside Australia, and its island cooking rests on produce — breadfruit, yam, fresh taro leaves — that is not sold everywhere. The recipes gathered here are therefore a beginning, chosen because they can genuinely be cooked elsewhere, rather than an inventory.

The Pacific principle is simple and comes down to two ingredients: a starchy root and the coconut. Taro, yam, breadfruit and cassava are steamed or baked in an earth oven, then pounded. Vanuatu's nalot is the purest example — taro or breadfruit crushed in a mortar with hot coconut cream until it turns into a smooth, glossy paste. In Guam, Chamorro gollai hågon suni simmers young taro leaves in coconut milk with turmeric, and in Papua New Guinea kaima bona gatoi grills aubergine and sweet potato before marinating them in lime and chilli.

Two other Oceanias sit alongside. That of Indian indenture: in Fiji, close to half the population descends from labourers who arrived from India in the late nineteenth century, and aloo boda tarkari is an Indian curry that became Fijian. And that of Australian settlers, whose damper, baked without baker's yeast, belongs to the bush, while avocado toast — born in Sydney cafés in the 1990s — travelled the world before coming home.