Aunu Habre｜Southwest Papua

Part 17/38 in a series exploring one dish from each province of Indonesia.

This is another one I’m not so sure of. There’s never much available online about Papuan cuisine, and most of the time what does exist is just copied-and-pasted articles on Jakarta-based news and lifestyle sites that repeat the same unsourced information from each other. And I’m afraid this recipe, just like eurimoo and aunu senebre, has come from trying to track back that chain of copying as far as possible. I also tried to find any possible background on the words aunu, aunuve, and habre, but even those don’t seem to turn up anywhere else. If anyone has any solid information about this dish then please do get in touch.

This dish seems to be the same as what is often called aunuve habre or anuve habre, so these three terms are what I researched. The earliest source I could find for this is a recipe by Franc Wiedenhoff in 2008, then a different one from Resep Kuliner Indonesia dan Dunia in 2011. Interestingly they are different; the basic recupe is the same, but on the surface at least it seems they haven’t just copied each other, which suggests this dish exists somewhere before these two, but I can’t find anything more unfortunately. Although now that I look again they do look suspiciously similar… Anyway, the next results are from about 2014 or 2015, and they 100% do just copy the earlier ones. The only useful reference to specifically aunu habre is the 2010 book Mahakarya Kuliner - 5000 Resep Makanan & Minuman di Indonesia.

So I’ve adapted the older results into the recipe below. It’s kind of like pendap in some ways really. As I say, do get in touch if you have any information about this dish, or even about the words in its name.

☒ UNTESTED

Ingredients

• _ taro leaves
• 4 skipjack tuna fillets
• 1 tbsp salt
• 1 tsp tamarind
• 50ml water

Cooking

Mix the salt, tamarind, and water, then strain

Marinate the fish in that for 15 minutes

Steam the taro leaves until wilted

Wrap the fish in the leaves

Place in a pan, add water, steam/simmer for __ minutes