Tonga's parcels of taro leaves packed with corned beef and onion, drowned in coconut cream and baked slowly until the leaves turn silk
Origin: Nukuʻalofa & Tonga
From the journey of Taro.
The name is two words and both are the dish. Lū is the taro leaf, and it is the leaf rather than the corm that Tonga is talking about; pulu is beef, borrowed straight from the English bullock and pronounced the way Tongan phonology requires. Layer the one around the other, pour in coconut cream until the parcel is heavy with it, and bake it in the ʻumu for the better part of an afternoon. What happens in that time is a transformation with no real equivalent elsewhere. The leaves go in stiff, bitter, and inedible, dense with the calcium oxalate needles that make raw taro leaf burn the mouth for hours, and they come out black-green, silken, and faintly mineral, having braised in coconut fat until every crystal has broken down and the leaf has stopped being a vegetable and become something closer to a sauce. The corned beef melts into it. Long cooking here is not a stylistic preference; it is the entire reason the dish exists in the form it does. The beef arrived in a tin, and that is a history worth stating plainly rather than apologising for. Nineteenth-century traders and missionaries brought salted and tinned meat into a group of islands with almost no grazing land and no refrigeration, and it took hold precisely because it kept indefinitely in a hot climate, could be carried to a feast, and tasted of salt and fat, which is exactly what a diet of root crops wants. Tinned corned beef became a prestige food and a gift food across Tonga and the wider Pacific, and it remains both. It is also, along with imported fatty offcuts of mutton and poultry, part of a shift in Pacific diets away from fish and root vegetables whose consequences for the region's health are now a serious and well-documented public concern. Lū pulu is not the cause of that; it is one of the places where an imported ingredient was absorbed so completely into a local technique that the join no longer shows. The ʻumu is the Tongan cousin of the Samoan umu, the Tahitian ahima'a, and the Māori hāngī, and it belongs to Sunday. Tongan Sundays are protected by law: trading is largely prohibited, and the meal that follows church is cooked the day before or in the morning and eaten at length by the whole household. An oven at 180°C will do the same work in a domestic kitchen, and most Tongan families abroad make it that way, wrapped in foil rather than in banana leaf.
Taro leaves must be cooked until they are entirely soft, because the calcium oxalate crystals in the raw leaf cause severe irritation of the mouth and throat that lasts for hours, and only long wet cooking destroys them. Two hours sealed is the minimum and there is no harm in three. Frozen taro leaves from a Pacific or Caribbean grocer are excellent here and are what most cooks abroad use; cassava leaves are the nearest substitute and need the same treatment, whilst spinach does not work at all, since it collapses to nothing in a quarter of the time. Use thick coconut cream rather than the thin milk sold for curries. Corned beef is already heavily salted, so taste before adding any.
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