Tiopunita

I have absolutely no information about this dish except that it was referenced in 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 Ansina Kony of the College of Micronesia, as a member of the Agriculture Instructional Materials Service nutrition work team. Based on that information alone I’m assuming this dish is Micronesian in origin, but I really can’t find any other reference to the word tiopunita, or variations of it, anywhere online.

I’ve even tried breaking it down into any vaguely similar words that might exist in the few online dictionaries of Micronesian languages, hoping that maybe some chunk of that word might turn out to mean ‘fish’ or ‘papaya’ or give some clue like that. Nothing remotely relevant in Chuukese, the best I could get in Yapese was thiyoegaeng (tapioca), and I went down a rabbit hole of looking at Pohnpeian words like tihpw and thinking something like that could be a more proper spelling of the first two syllables of this dish, or like tipwenpilla (extremely thirsty), but I can’t force any of those to make any sense in this context.

So this one’s a bit of a mystery.

Serves 3

☒ UNTESTED

Ingredients

• 400 g canned mackerel
• 100 ml coconut milk
• 1 green papaya, julienne
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• 2 carrots, julienne
• 4 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp curry powder
• 100 g pumpkin leaves
• 1 tsp salt

Cooking

Set some sweet potatoes to boil while you’re doing the rest of this.

Saute garlic and onion for __ minutes.

Add papaya and carrots, fry until tender (~__ minutes).

Add the tinned mackerel (not the liquid) and pumpkin leaves, stir.

Add the coconut milk, bring to a simmer.

Add the curry powder and salt, simmer for 1 minute.

Serve with boiled sweet potato.