I’ve been on holiday and so missed posting a blog for last week, but this week I again have a post about food. As part of the “Food of the World” segment in my “Languages of the World” course at NTU Singapore, I have been cooking food from a linguistic group represented in that week, so that students can get an idea of possible foods in a fieldwork situation. The course gives an overview of world languages, highlighting various theories about language development and human migration, as well as providing a survey of major families, linguistic typology, and the cultures and practices of different groups.

Restrictions

Given the mixture of student backgrounds and to cater for various dietary restrictions, I modify recipes to be vegetarian/Buddhist (Mahayana) friendly, which means avoiding onions, garlic and other pungent vegetables and listing out all the ingredients and preparation beforehand, so students can decide whether to partake in the week’s option. I also ask students to let me know of any allergies on the first day of class.

Recipe for “Languages of Australia & Papua New Guinea”: Kaima Bona Gatoi

The fifth week of presentations we surveyed the Languages of Australia & Papua New Guinea (PNG). This area was one of the earliest to which humans migrated from Africa, sometime before the first ice age, and languages in these areas have been spoken so long that there is incredible diversity and it can be quite difficult to identify which languages are related to each other.

The traditional food suggested by the students was Kaima Bona Gatoi, which is a roasted vegetable dish from PNG. While there were some other suggestions, some of them were a bit difficult to source. This dish is quite simple and tastes quite good on its own, though it can also supplement other dishes.

Kaima Bona Gatoi (Papua New Guinea roasted vegetables)

Ingredients:

Spices:

• paprika
• cayenne
• salt
• vinegar
• oil

Vegetables:

• zucchini
• eggplant
• sweet potato
• carrot

How to cook:

1. Place cut/sliced vegetables in a large dish
2. Mix other ingredients in a bowl
3. Pour mixture over vegetables, marinade overnight (in fridge) or for a few hours
4. Bake in oven on high in an open baking dish/tray for up to 30 minutes, or place vegetables on grill for cooking, 8-10 minutes

Notes:

I don’t have strict recommendations on how much of each ingredient/spice to add. I went mostly with a feel on this, based on how many vegetables I used. I probably could have cut quite a few more vegetables as they cooked down a fair bit. I think what really makes this recipe unique is the vinegar, which could probably be experimented with a bit - I used black vinegar.