Mongo Lon Saak
I don’t have much information about this dish as it’s another one adapted from the Pacific Islands Cookbook (ISBN 1931435391), published by the ADAP (Agricultural Development in the American Pacific) project in 1994. This particular recipe was apparently provided by Floria James of the Northern Marianas College, as a member of the Agriculture Instructional Materials Service nutrition work team.
I couldn’t find any reference to this dish anywhere else, so I had to go digging a little bit to find out that it is Micronesian. Mongo and lon both appear in some crazy Jehovah’s Witness articles that have been translated into Chuukese, and seem to mean ‘food’ and ‘in, at, on (etc.)’ respectively. But there’s no reference to saak there. Luckily though I stumbled across a Satawalese dictionary which lists saak to mean ‘coconut shell’, which is a key part of this dish! This dictionary also gives mwongo as ‘cooked food’, ‘meal’, or ‘vegetables’, and as Satawalese is a Chuukic language I think we’ve solved it. This dish is called ‘food in a coconut shell’, or ‘veg in a coconut shell’.
Further confirmation comes from Emerson Lopez Odango’s Ph.D. thesis on the Mortlockese language (a sister language to Satawalese), where mwongo and saak are also translated as ‘food’ and ‘coconut shell’.
Oh, and the original recipe listed “chopped buoy nuts”, which absolutely did not show up anywhere until I found that the Yapese name for the Tahitian chestnut is the bu’oy nut. So given we’ve got pretty clear links to Chuuk, Satawal, and Yap, I think it’s fair to say this is definitely a Micronesian dish.
Serves 4
☒ UNTESTED
Ingredients
- 2 medium taro (___ g)
- 8 spring onions, chopped
- 2 red bell peppers, chopped
- 70 g sweet potato leaves, chopped
- 150 g walnuts, chopped (more properly Tahitian chestnut)
- 400 g meat (fish, crab, octopus, tinned mackerel, or corned beef)
- 2 carrots, chopped
- 4 coconuts
Cooking
Cut the top off the coconuts and drain the liquid.
Boil the taro until cooked (__ minutes), then dice.
Fill each coconut with a portion of everything, with the coconut milk and a sprinkle of salt going last. Tie the lids back on.
Bake for ~45 minutes, with a little water in a baking tray under the coconuts.
Serve with a lemon wedge.