Fai se Umu (Making the Oven)

Happy Thanksgiving! Today was a hard day to be away from home but Peace Corps did a great job of making the best of the situation and it was a really great day. Instead of being in classes all day today like we usually are during the week, we had a cooking day where we were taught how to make a traditional Samoan umu (an open outdoor oven made by heating up rocks and placing food amongst them, all of which is covered by large leaves to cook). At 8 in the morning all the trainees and members of their families gathered out behind my house, many with live chickens in tow, to get working at the hard and laborious task of making a traditional meal. First, large logs are brought in and placed on top of rocks and then lit on fire. This is left to burn so that the rocks can get hot while the food is being prepared. The villagers had set up a sort of a station deal for us so that we could experience all the different components of cooking the meal. There were taro roots to scrape clean with the end of a tin can. (Taro, an extremely starchy root vegetable is THE staple food of Samoa. It is eaten with absolutely everything, used more or less like a utensil to scoop up whatever else happens to be on the plate. The roots are cooked whole and then people break off chunks of them to use when eating.) There were also fa’i (look like green bananas, taste like plantains- we’re big into starch here) to peel and cook in the umu. There was a large pile of popo (ripe coconuts) to turn into coconut cream for making palusami. This is one of the most laborious processes one could imagine in order to obtain food. First, you have to find a coconut, which just might involve climbing up a tree. Then you need to husk it, which is no easy task, even when mashing it against a pole stuck in the ground (check out my particularly flattering photos of some of the guys in our group at this fun task). After it’s husked, you whack it open with a machete (this is actually easier and much less scary than it sounds). You then take the two halves and scrape the meat out by grinding it against a blade attached to the end of a bench. Once the coconut has been grated, you take some sort of fiber stuff and start scooping up handfuls of the coconut which you then ring out in the fibers in order to extract the cream in liquid form, dumping the dry shreds to the side. It takes a LONG time and a fair amount of muscle to turn a huge bowl of coconut into cream. To make the palusami, which I might have mentioned in an earlier posting, you pour some of the cream into a cupped stack of young taro leaves, which you then wrap up first in a banana leaf then a breadfruit leaf before cooking. A traditional umu also always contains... a pig. Those of you who know me can only imagine how ecstatic I was at the thought of watching my family and friends pull a pig out of the pen in our back yard, suffocate it to death, singe all its hair off, pull its innards out and stuff it with hot rocks, and cook it whole. Let’s just say I spent a lot of time grating coconut and try really hard to look in the other direction and try not to think about it. There was also the killing of the chickens, also by suffocation. Various members of our crew were quite excited to kill the chickens that their family members had given them to bring, and I again tried really hard to be oblivious to the process. Once all the food was prepared, the rocks were spread out, and the taro, fa’i, pua’a (pig) and pipi (two turkeys the Peace Corps staff purchased to make the volunteers feel at home for the holiday) were placed on top of them. Another layer of rocks was placed on top of this and then the palusami went on top. Everything was then covered by giant banana leaves and left to cook. We all went to weave the baskets that are used for carrying the food, and about a half hour later all the food was cooked (maybe Americans should take a hint from the Samoans- their umu managed to cook a whole turkey in about a tenth the time of a conventional oven). We then served the food in traditional fashion to the village matai (titled men). After the meal was over we packed up what was left and the trainers drove us out to a beautiful beach on the south side of the island called Vavau where we had a Thanksgiving picnic and spent the afternoon playing in the water. Not a bad way to pass the day, if I do say so myself.