Yu No Kick Part 2: Local Cuisine

There is one belief that I hold above all others and that is that a good meal is the best thing in the world. Perhaps there are some that would disagree with me. Perhaps there are some that would point to things like love, or friendship, or NASCAR and say “wait, isn’t THAT the best thing?” But they’re wrong. Nothing else brings a smile like a good meal. It doesn’t really even matter what it is. With the right approach, anything can be made into a mouth-watering, taste-bud-tickling delight. People like to subdivide food into neat little categories so they can organize restaurants listings in the phone book. Italian food, French food, Japanese food, Indian food, Thai food. In the end, there are only two categories that matter: good food and bad food. There are hot dog stands that turn out sublime wonders of flavor and suit-and-tie-required French restaurants whose fare makes cardboard seem appetizing. It’s all in the execution. My family and I tend to plan our vacations around where we’ll be eating. “Want to go to the art museum? Hmm. Sorry, it’s all the way across town from the seafood place we want to try. Maybe next time.” Our memories are all wrapped up in what we’ve eaten. “No, that couldn’t have been Nick’s tenth birthday because that’s the year we went to the pizza place. You know, the one with the good thick crust?” We're not picky, we'll eat anything, as long as it's good.

A lot of people claim not to know how to cook. They site being clumsy or forgetful or too afraid of screwing up, but I think this is bogus. All that's required to make a good meal is a complete and utter obsession with food. Those content with microwave pasta for dinner will never be able to cook well because they'll never see the point: why work hard to prepare something special if you're content with something mediocre? The extra time and effort will just seem wasted. On the other hand, a true foodie will think nothing of walking two hours to get a fresh fish then gutting, scaling, and de-boning it if it means a really good fish fillet for dinner. Even if said foodie has no idea how to go about scaling or gutting a fish, they're sure as hell going to find out. In cooking, as with many things, where there a will, there is a way. Thus, the will is everything.

In Vanuatu, it's easy to give up on food, even for such a devotee as myself. It's hard to muster up the will to bake a batch of cookies when the first step is sharpening a machete to go to chop down a tree for firewood. A lot of volunteers eventually give up on the whole cooking thing altogether and just subsist on boiled bananas provided by their host families. Some of us turn to kava as a replacement for food, which is sort of odd because kava is pretty much the exact opposite of food, it has absolutely no nutritional value and it tastes awful. It's kind of like drinking Diet Coke, if Diet Coke were mud-flavored. However, it's one thing for a volunteer living in Vanuatu for a couple years to suck it up and give up on good food for the duration of his service, knowing that he'll be able to return to it eventually, but it's another thing for a Ni-Van living in Vanuatu all their life to not strive for something beyond the plain, boiled root vegetable. Like with a lot of things, a lack of technology does mean some complications. We like to romanticize about simpler times before modern gadgets took the fun out of everything, but the fact of the matter is that, although a wood-burning oven may sound quaint and appealing, the lack of fine temperature control provided by gas or electric ovens means that goods prepared in an old-fashioned oven tend to be either burnt or undercooked. But, although technology has made fine food more accessible and made possible some previously unattainable culinary feats, the fact remains that good food predates Food Network. Which begs the question, what the heck happened in Vanuatu to make their cuisine so soul-crushingly boring?

The root crop is the mainstay of the Vanuatu diet. It makes sense. They're easy to grow, they're starchy and satisfying, and they have a long shelf life. You can divide root crops into four categories: manioc, yams, taro, and kumala. Manioc is what we use to make tapioca in the states. It's probably the most potato-like of the group. The meat is straight white and has that kind of flour-y, starchy texture. Yams are the broadest of the categories. There are dozen, perhaps hundreds, or different kinds of yams in Vanuatu. They range from potato-sized to full-grown-cow sized. Some have tough, wooden skins, almost like bark, some have thin, soft skins, and some have skins with long, vein-y roots growing out of them. Sometimes they're white on the inside, sometimes they're purple, and sometimes they're white with purple streaks. They can have mild, potato-y tastes or strong, wild tastes. In short, you never really know what you're getting into with a yam. Taro grow in particularly wet, swampy areas. They put out large, triangular leaves that can be as big as your chest and make decent umbrellas in a pinch. Their skins are brown and bark-y, but dotted with purple nodules. They're vaguely reddish-purple on the inside and are so incredibly starchy that cutting one covers your knife and cutting board with a flour-like paste. When you cook taro, you have to be sure to make sure every last bit of it gets soaked in plenty of water or oil or the result will taste like eating dry flour. Kumala are sweet potatoes, and are my personal favorite root crop. Sweet potatoes are kind of magical: they're easy to grow, they keep for months without preservation, they taste good, and they have more nutrients than any of the other root crops. There are two varieties of kumala in Vanuatu. One is similar to the kind you can buy in the US, brown skin with orange flesh. The second has purple skin and white flesh and is slightly sweeter. Personally, I'm a brown-and-orange fan. Unfortunately, kumala doesn't seem to get as much use as the other root crops, probably because you can't make lap-lap out of it.

The standard root crop concoction is lap-lap, and, in my opinion, manioc makes the best lap-lap. Lap-lap is essentially baked root crop mush. I can see it as perhaps a precursor to a flat bread, except they never got as far as drying their starchy mush to remove the excess water before cooking and achieve that nice, fluffy, bread texture. To make lap-lap, you peel your root crop and grate it against a rough board to make a paste. You then take the paste and wrap it in leaves. Then you put the whole thing in an underground oven made by digging a hole and filling it with hot stones. The lap-lap goes in the hole and then is covered with dirt and allowed to sit for a few hours until it congeals. Dig it up and enjoy. Serves 6-10. Manioc and taro lap-lap have the doughiest texture, kind of like raw pizza dough. Yam lap-lap is a little more mealy. Banana lap-lap is more goop-y (yes, I forgot to mention, you can make lap-lap with bananas too. Either unripe sweet bananas or plantaines. No one really like banana lap-lap though, even Ni-Vans complain that it's unappetizing).It's not that lap-lap is bad, it's just not anything. It's plain white bread, or dry mashed potatoes, or plain oatmeal, it's a vehicle for other flavors, not a complete meal in and of itself. Commonly, chunks of meat are cooked in with the root crop paste, which improves the flavor substantially as the drippings from the meat soak into the lap-lap. The more adventurous Ni-Van chefs will add salt or curry powder to the paste, which also adds a welcome addition of flavor. On Malekula, a hole is made in the middle of the lap-lap and then filled with coconut milk after the lap-lap is cooked. You can then dip your lap-lap pieces in the milk before eating. The coconut milk adds much-needed hints of sweetness and oiliness. Overall, lap-lap isn't a bad dish, it's just not something you'd expect as the crowning achievement of thousands of years of culinary practice.

There are other ways to enjoy root crops of course. Simboro is another common dish and is sort of a lap-lap variant. Instead of taking your root crop paste and wrapping it in large banana leaves to bake, you wrap it in island cabbage leaves. Island cabbage leaves are a lot smaller, but they have the advantage of being edible. Island cabbage is one of those vegetables that likes to remind you that you are, in fact, eating a leaf. Maybe it's just from experience, but things like lettuce or cabbage don't look particularly leafy to me. Like, it's obvious they didn't fall off a tree. But not island cabbage. Island cabbage looks like a leaf straight from a tree. It looks like something you might have to rake up off your yard come fall or that you might use to wipe yourself while camping. It tastes kind of like spinach or kale. Anyway, you take your paste and wrap it up in island cabbage to make little rolls that look kind of like damales (grape leaves stuffed with spiced meat and rice and soaked in lemon juice), except they don't taste nearly as good. You then boil the rolls until the paste congeals and serve. I'm not a big fan of simboro, because it's basically exactly like lap-lap, except it's often served by itself, without meat or coconut milk to enhance the flavor, and thus is spectacularly bland. Also, the island cabbage tends to get kind of slimy when you boil it, which is a little off-putting.

My favorite Vanuatu dish is probably bunya. Chop up a bunch of meat and a bunch of kumala or taro, wrap everything in banana leaves, and cook it underground, lap-lap style for a few hours. The meat gets nice and tender from the slow cooking, the banana leaves trap all the moisture inside, and the kumala soak up all the meat juices. Optionally, squeeze some coconut milk on top after it's done cooking. Simple, to the point, good.

The thing is, that that's basically about it as far as traditional dishes go: three dishes, two of which are almost the same. Just a bit of a letdown. That's not to say, of course, that lap-lap, simboro, and bunya are the only three things to eat in Vanuatu, just that these are pretty much the only prepared meals. Most other things are just eaten as is. Pineapples, mangoes, guavas, passion fruit, papayas, avocados, oranges, grapefruits, lychee, and bananas are all eaten raw and plain. I've never seen anyone incorporate fruit into their cooking. It seems like there are some good sauces and pastries that could be made. Peanuts, nangai (kind of like almonds) and other local nuts are also usually eaten raw and plain. Pumpkin and other squashes are boiled and eaten, sometimes with coconut milk. We've got tons of seafood, crabs, clams, mussels, lobsters, prawns, and fish, which are boiled or roasted and eaten plain or incorporated into lap-lap. We have spices. There are small, thai-style hot peppers no bigger than a fingernail but that pack quite a punch. We've got wild ginger and vanilla and pepper and spring onions and lemon grass, all of which go more or less unused. It just seems like there's a lot of potential going to waste in Ni-Vanuatu cuisine. Most of the raw ingredients are there, and yet there are no peanut sauces, no curries, no chutneys, and no fruit pastries. Sometimes I wonder what went wrong, but then I realize that I, who should know better being a food snob of sorts back in the US, have fallen into the same pattern. Most of my meals consist of little more than fried kumala and the occasional piece of plain fruit or meat. I think maybe its the heat.