ʻOta ʻika

Tonga's raw fish cured in lime and dressed in fresh coconut cream, cut with cucumber, tomato and spring onion

Origin: Nukuʻalofa & the Tongan Archipelago

From the journey of Coconut.

The name is the recipe. ʻOta is raw and ʻika is fish, and the same two words recur across the Polynesian languages: Samoan oka iʻa is the identical dish under cognate names, and Tahitian poisson cru is the same thing again with a French label attached. Fijian kokoda, a little further west, is the Melanesian member of the family. All of them are raw fish, citrus, and coconut cream, and each island group will tell you its own is the original. What the lime does is chemistry rather than cooking. The acid denatures the proteins in the flesh, firming it and turning it opaque in much the way heat would, without any heat being applied, and the timing is therefore the whole skill. Ten to fifteen minutes gives fish that is firm at the edge and still translucent at the centre, which is what Tongans want. Left an hour it goes chalky and dry all through, and no amount of coconut cream will bring it back. The coconut cream is the second half and it must be fresh if it can be. Tonga presses it from mature nuts on the day, and the difference between that and the tinned product is the difference between a living sweetness and a flat one. It goes in only after the lime has been drained off, since acid and coconut cream left together will curdle. It belongs to Sunday. The Tongan week is built around church and the meal that follows it, and ʻota ʻika appears on that table alongside whatever has come out of the ʻumu, the underground oven of hot stones in which the rest of the feast is baked. The two techniques sit at opposite ends of the same cuisine: nothing cooked at all, and everything cooked slowly underground. Tonga is the one Pacific island nation never annexed by a colonial power. It was a British protected state from 1900 to 1970, which constrained its foreign affairs, but it kept its monarchy, its land system, and its sovereignty throughout, and the Tuʻi Tonga line behind that monarchy is traced back roughly a thousand years. The continuity shows on the plate: the food of a Tongan Sunday is recognisably the food of the archipelago rather than of anywhere else. Samoa's oka iʻa has its own entry. The words are cognate and the dish very nearly the same, though Samoan cooks lean on lemon rather than lime and finish it with chilli.

Ingredients

  • 600 g very fresh tuna, snapper, or mahi mahi, skinned and boned
  • 8 limes, juiced (about 200ml)
  • 400 ml thick coconut cream, freshly pressed if possible
  • 1 cucumber, deseeded and diced
  • 3 tomatoes, deseeded and diced
  • 1 small red onion, very finely diced
  • 4 spring onions, finely sliced
  • 1 red chilli, finely chopped (optional)
  • 1.5 tsp sea salt, or to taste

Method

  1. Buy the fish the day you intend to eat it and tell the fishmonger it is to be eaten raw. Freshness is the entire safety margin and there is no technique that compensates for its absence.
  2. Cut the fish into even 2cm cubes. Even is the operative word: uneven pieces cure at different rates and the small ones will be chalky before the large ones have firmed.
  3. Put the fish in a non-metallic bowl, pour over the lime juice, and add half the salt. The fish should be just submerged.
  4. Cure for ten to fifteen minutes only, turning once. Lift a cube and cut it: the outer few millimetres should be opaque and firm and the centre still translucent. That is the point to stop.
  5. Drain the lime juice away completely and discard it. This step is not optional. Acid left in the bowl will curdle the coconut cream into a grainy split mess within minutes.
  6. Return the drained fish to the bowl and pour over the coconut cream.
  7. Fold through the cucumber, tomato, red onion, spring onion, and chilli, and season with the remaining salt.
  8. Chill for fifteen minutes, no longer, and taste for salt just before serving. Serve cold in a bowl, or in the traditional way in a half coconut shell, with taro or green banana alongside.

Notes

Draining the lime before the coconut cream goes in is the step people skip and the one that decides whether the dish holds together. Curing time is the other: ten to fifteen minutes, and a piece cut open is a better guide than a clock. Fresh coconut cream is worth the effort where it can be had, and full-fat tinned is an honest substitute where it cannot; light coconut milk is not, and will give a thin dressing that slides off the fish. Deseed the cucumber and tomatoes or they will water the bowl down as they sit.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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