Tahiti's chicken braised with young taro leaves until they collapse into the coconut milk
Origin: Tahiti & the Society Islands
From the journey of Taro.
Fafa is the Tahitian word for the young leaf of the taro, and the dish is named for the leaf rather than for the bird. What the cook is making is a braise in which a great heap of greens, three or four times the volume anyone expects, cooks down for the better part of an hour into something dark, silky, and faintly metallic, and the coconut milk goes in at the end to round it. Chicken supplies the stock and the substance. The leaf supplies the character, and it is a character with no European equivalent: spinach is the usual substitute abroad and it produces a pleasant dish that is not this one. The leaves cannot be hurried, and the reason is chemical rather than culinary. Raw taro leaf is dense with calcium oxalate in the form of microscopic needle-shaped crystals, which lodge in the soft tissue of the mouth and throat and produce a fierce burning that lasts for hours. Prolonged wet cooking breaks them down completely. Every Pacific cuisine that eats the leaf has arrived independently at the same answer, which is to boil it long and boil it hard, and the traditional Tahitian instruction to cook the fafa until it is quite black is a food-safety rule dressed as a matter of taste. In its oldest form the dish belongs to the ahima'a, the Tahitian earth oven, where a chicken and a bundle of leaves were wrapped and buried on hot stones with the rest of the Sunday food. That meal, ma'a Tahiti, still follows church across the Society Islands, and it is cooked communally and eaten at length. Poulet fafa moved onto the stove during the nineteenth century without losing its place at the table, and it is now as likely to be the dish a Papeete household cooks on a weekday as the one it buries on a Sunday. The name carries the island's double history in four syllables. Poulet is French and arrived with the protectorate declared in 1842; fafa is Tahitian and considerably older than any European on the horizon.
Taro leaves must be cooked thoroughly and there is no way round it: the calcium oxalate crystals in the raw leaf cause severe and long-lasting irritation of the mouth and throat, and only prolonged wet cooking destroys them. Forty-five minutes at a simmer is the minimum. Buy them frozen from a Pacific or Caribbean grocer if fresh ones are hard to find, since frozen leaves work well here. If you substitute spinach, which many cooks abroad do, use half the weight, add it in the last ten minutes, and understand that you are making a different and much milder dish. Cassava leaves are the closer substitute in both texture and depth, and they need the same long cooking.
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