Oceanian Cuisines & Recipes.

Oceania is the smallest section of this atlas and the one most often flattened into a joke about barbecue. What is actually here is a set of very old Pacific food traditions and two of the more interesting modern cuisines anywhere. The old part is earth-oven cooking: the Māori hāngī and its cousins across the Pacific, the umu and the lovo, where heated stones buried with the food produce something no oven reproduces, and where the cooking is inseparable from the occasion that calls for it. Alongside it sits a shared island pantry of taro, breadfruit, coconut cream and fish cured in citrus — Cook Islands ika mata, Fijian kokoda, and the Hawaiian lineage behind poke, all versions of the same excellent idea. The modern part is what happened when Australia and New Zealand stopped cooking like a distant Britain. Decades of Greek, Italian, Lebanese, Vietnamese and Chinese migration rebuilt both countries' palates, and their kitchens now work in a Pacific Rim idiom with serious seafood, world-class lamb, and a coffee culture they exported back to Europe. Indigenous Australian ingredients — wattleseed, finger lime, saltbush, native pepper — are finally being cooked with rather than merely catalogued. Two countries, many island traditions, and a pavlova dispute nobody intends to resolve. The pages below take each on its own terms.

20 recipes on this route