Samoa

Samoan cooking answers to the umu — an above-ground oven of hot volcanic stones, lit fresh and left to smoke taro, breadfruit, fish and pork slowly under leaves. Its finest hour is Sunday's to'ona'i, the big family feast after church, cooked from the morning so everything's ready by midday. Tying it together is coconut cream, pe'epe'e, the central flavour of the whole cuisine: it sets into rich parcels of taro-leaf palusami and dresses oka i'a, tuna cured in citrus and coconut.

Layered over this subsistence-and-community table are outside threads absorbed whole — sapasui, a Samoan chop suey born of Chinese migration, now a fixture at every feast. Samoa even grows its own cocoa, drunk thick and dark as koko Samoa. For the real thing, chase a Sunday umu over a restaurant, and browse oka and panikeke at Apia's Maketi Fou market.