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

Umukai

The Cook Islands

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 3 hours

Researched: 17 sources cited
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

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, exactly the kind of honest layering this atlas prefers to name rather than hide. [SOAS Library Special Collections blog]

The Cook Islands

Christianity's arrival is the one piece of history genuinely shared by both halves of this volume, and it travelled from one to the other. The LMS landed in Tahiti in 1797; chief Pomare II converted around 1812 to 1815, defeated rival chiefs in November 1815 and destroyed the war god ʻOro's idol, after which most of the Society Islands adopted Christianity within about five years. Pomare also sought to monopolise the pork trade with New South Wales, evidence that pork was already a commodified, exportable good under early colonial contact rather than a purely ritual food. [Britannica, Pomare II] LMS missionaries then carried that conversion onward, accompanied by Tahitian converts: the Tahitian evangelist Papeiha, trained under John Williams, was central to the conversion of Aitutaki in 1821 and Rarotonga in 1823. Missionaries, working with the ariki, imposed strict "Blue Laws" restricting night gatherings and belief, and suppressed tattooing; kava drinking was virtually eliminated. Sunday worship became the organising axis of communal celebration, the direct root of the umukai-as-Sunday-feast pattern that persists in the Cook Islands today, and of the ahimaʻa-as-Sunday-feast pattern that persists in Tahiti. SOAS Library Special Collections blog, "Cook Islander missionaries," 2 October 2020

Read the history

As tradition built it

Roughly 3 hours in the pit.

Ingredients

as available pork, chicken, or both
as available fish
as needed banana leaf, for wrapping
to serve potato salad, to serve

Method

Dig a pit and heat stones as described for the ahimaʻa (Rung 1).
Wrap the pork, chicken or both, and the fish, in banana leaf and lay them over the heated stones.
Seal under leaf and earth and leave to cook for roughly three hours.
Serve with potato salad as the now-standard accompaniment.

Notes

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

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

Cook the umukai meat and fish on a Big Green Egg in indirect mode, exactly as Rung 1 describes for the ahimaʻa entry above.
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.
Serve both together on one plate rather than separately, honouring the accompaniment's now-real place in the feast.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists