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Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia · Volume 13, One Reef, Two Flags

Umukai

The Cook Islands

Umukai, Cook Islands earth oven feast with pork, fish and potato salad: a wide board of earth oven cooked pork and fish still on banana leaf, a bowl of pale creamy potato salad set beside it, the meat glistening and falling apart.

Illustration

Time
8 hours

Meat, typically pork, chicken or both, plus fish, wrapped in banana leaf and cooked over heated stones in a dug pit, commonly cited at roughly three hours. What makes this dish worth pairing rather than merging with the ahimaʻa entry above is one specific, well-documented detail: potato salad now appears as a conventional accompaniment to the umukai feast, a European-introduced dish folded permanently into the ceremony over generations. [SOAS Library Special Collections blog]

As tradition built it

About four hours to heat the stones, then about four hours' cooking.

Ingredients

The tradition's method, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them.

  • pork
  • chicken
  • vegetables, pumpkin and bananas

For the oven

To serve

Method

  1. Start the fire in the umu pit with orange tree twigs, then burn coconut husks and ironwood, which burn very hot.
  2. Pile rocks on top and leave them about four hours, until hot enough.
  3. Lay in the meat and vegetables, cover them with banana leaves, then a fireproof sheet.
  4. Cook slowly about four hours.
  5. Serve with taro, chow mein, potato salad and salads cooked the ordinary way.

Notes

Potato salad now appears as a conventional accompaniment to the umukai feast, a European-introduced dish folded permanently into the ceremony over generations.

The method is Papa Rima's, the umu maker at Highland Paradise on Rarotonga, as RaroLens recorded it in June 2009; it is an island night umu, and gives no quantities. No fish goes into it.

What a modern chef changes

The potato salad taken as seriously as the earth-oven meat itself, rather than treated as an afterthought, since it is the honest present-day layer of this dish.

Rung 1

Method

  1. Cook the umukai meat and fish on a Big Green Egg in indirect mode, exactly as Rung 1 describes for the ahimaʻa entry above.
  2. Make the potato salad properly, with a real emulsified dressing rather than a bought jar, treating it as a genuine component of the dish rather than a colonial-era intrusion to be quietly dropped.
  3. Serve both together on one plate rather than separately, honouring the accompaniment's now-real place in the feast.
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