The Marquesan breadfruit paste: mā, breadfruit fermented in the pit, pounded with freshly cooked breadfruit into a sour, smooth staple that kept the valleys fed through drought
Origin: Nuku Hiva & the Marquesas Islands
From the journey of Breadfruit.
The Marquesas are steep, dry for months at a time, and subject to droughts that could starve a valley, and their answer was the breadfruit pit. At the height of the season breadfruit was peeled, cut, and packed into pits lined with leaves, where it fermented into a sour paste called mā that would keep for years; across Polynesia and Micronesia there are reports of pits whose contents were still edible decades after they were filled. Popoi is mā made ready to eat. A portion of the fermented paste is pounded with freshly cooked breadfruit on a board with a stone pounder until smooth, thinned with water, and eaten with the fingers. The pounder itself, the keʻa tuki popoi, is one of the characteristic objects of Marquesan archaeology. Breadfruit here is old. Starch grains of breadfruit have been recovered from shell tools in Marquesan sites dated to between about 1400 and 1600, and the first European description of the tree is generally credited to the Spanish expedition of Álvaro de Mendaña, which anchored in the Marquesas in July 1595 and whose chief pilot, Pedro Fernández de Quirós, left the account. English writers long gave the discovery to William Dampier, who met the fruit on Guam nearly a century later; Elizabeth DeLoughrey has pointed out how thoroughly the English record overlooked the Spanish one.
Mā is still made in the Marquesas, in pits or, now more often, in lined drums: mature breadfruit is peeled, cored, washed, packed tightly under leaves, weighted, and left for several weeks to ferment. Outside the islands the nearest substitute is to pound a portion of cooked breadfruit with a little water, cover it closely, and leave it at room temperature for two to three days until it smells pleasantly sour, as one would sour poi. The Marquesan kaaku is a different preparation: fresh breadfruit pounded and dressed with coconut milk, without the fermented paste.
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