#4 Tonga
- Jen
- Aug 8, 2019
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 4, 2022
Get your coconuts out!
European voyages have repeatedly made contact with Tonga from the 1600s onwards. Notable visitors include Abel Tasman (off of Tasmania, the Tasman National Park, the Tasman Sea, the Tasman Glacier and probably some other geographical features in NZ and Aus) and my second favourite sailor of all time, Captain James Cook (Captain Jack Sparrow being number one).
Quick fire facts:
· It’s officially known as the Kingdom of Tonga.
· Tonga is a member of the Commonwealth despite having always maintained its sovereignty.
· The population is circa 100,000.
· Tonga comprises 169 islands, 36 of which are inhabited.
· Some of their postage stamps are banana-shaped.
I’m guessing that the food produced, imported and eaten in the Pacific island nations is going to be fairly similar, you know, because they’re all tropical islands in the same part of the world and because they have fairly similar history. To avoid posting ten near-identical blogs, I’m going to focus on one aspect of the cuisine from each country. I’m probably going to have this issue in the Caribbean too…but as promised, I’ll be so drunk on rum I won’t care!
Obesity
Like with all the Pacific island nations, Tonga is battling an obesity epidemic. About 75% of the population are overweight, with women being generally fatter than the men. To put that into context, about 63% of Brits are overweight (Wikipedia). Up to 40% of the population are thought to have Type II diabetes (BBC).
Cheap offcuts of meat from the USA and New Zealand are to blame for this health crisis. “Mutton flaps” (fatty offcuts of lamb) from New Zealand and tinned fatty meats are eaten by almost everyone. Corned beef has become part of the traditional fare.
Seriously, how sad would you be if you got fat eating corned beef?! When I get fat and gouty (let’s be honest, it’s miraculous it hasn’t already happened) I sincerely hope it’s because I’ve had too much pâté and port, not corned flipping beef!
I would like to stress that I’m not singling Tongans out as being the only massive ladies and gents in the Pacific but as it’s the first of these countries I’ve picked out I thought I’d address this issue now so we don’t have to dwell on it later. I’m sorry Tonga!
So, with cheap meat and clogged arteries in mind, I’m going to head out to buy myself a tin of corned beef and I’m going to rustle up what is considered the national dish of Tonga: lupulu.
Lupulu
Lupulu is (corned) beef (pulu meaning “bull”) and coconut cream wrapped together in a parcel of taro leaves (lu) and traditionally baked on a fire or in an underground oven.
I have only ever consumed one tin of corned beef in my life prior to this blog and that was gifted to me by my Auntie Dawn when I was 24. She couldn’t believe I’d never had it before and insisted I took a tin home. I tried it on its own – yuk, in sandwiches – nope, and in a hash – terrible. There’s just nothing good about it. Even the tin it comes in is ridiculous; the corned beef tin manufacturers must only be able to sell their tins to the corned beef producers AND you need instructions to open the darn thing! JUST USE A ROUND TIN!!!
My friend Geoff, who is an ex-pat living in American Samoa, explained to me that the beauty of this dish is the coconut cream fresh from the coconut and that I’ll find nothing like it in a tin over here. But, for the sake of a dish based around a product that really only took off to feed slaves and soldiers I cannot be bothered to source a suitable coconut and learn how to safely abstract the cream. I’ll save that fun for my next tropical country.
Cook the World tropical root & tuber crop lesson #1: taro. Taro is a root vegetable, originally from southeast Asia. It is grown and eaten throughout the Pacific region. Both the root and leaves are toxic if they’re not cooked properly but it’s full of fibre and minerals so the risk/reward ratio is favourable.
Cooking and eating lupulu
I’m not sure where you can find taro in Cardiff so Swiss chard leaves are tagging in instead…because they were the biggest leaves I could find in Sainsbury’s.
Preparation:
· Lay out the leaves on a sheet of foil.
· Add corned beef.
· Add sliced onion and tomato.
· Poor over coconut cream.
· Wrap leaves and foil around to form a parcel.
· Bake in a medium oven for a couple of hours.
I wanted to serve this with something that grows in Tonga so I made cassava chips.
Cook the World tropical root & tuber crop lesson #2: cassava. This is another root, native to the Americas but widely consumed in many tropical regions. It’s the same as a yuca and processed into pudding it’s known as tapioca. Like taro, it’s poisonous if not peeled and cooked properly.
I didn’t tell my dinner guest, Tom, that he would be dicing with death when I offered to cook for him so if I don’t get an angry phone call after posting this I’ll know he’s only pretending to read my blog! It was an evening of health and safety nightmares all round in the end; both housemate Rhiannon and I managed to cut our fingers trying to open the corned beef tin, thus adding to my argument that the tin is ridiculous.
“You’ve made corned beef edible.”
That’s as great praise as I could ever have expected. We ate coconut-flavour corned beef. It was fine. I’ll die happy if I never eat this again but equally, if I marry a Tongan number eight I’ll happily make this for his birthday. I’m not saying that cooking this on the BBQ would have been an absolute game changer (it’s still tinned meat) but I do think a bit of smoke would have been a welcome addition to the flavour.
The chips were more of a hit. I remember that boiled, unseasoned cassava was served with almost everything in the cheaper resorts in Fiji and it didn’t really add much to the meals apart from calories. Roasted in crispy chip format, salted and paprika-ed, cassava is actually pretty tasty.
Once again, my sincere apologies to Tonga for completely overlooking all of the, what would have no doubt been wonderful, fresh seafood and tropical fruit opportunities that were gifted to me when I pulled the paper out of the saucepan. It’s not your fault we inflicted these terrible trapezoidal tins upon your fine archipelago.
Fingers crossed they don’t have corned beef in...BOTSWANA. #jencookstheworld
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