Vanuatu’s national dish, laplap (a kind of stone-cooked yam-paste pudding) is so unphotogenic that I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to eating it on my trip to the South Pacific.
It probably didn’t help that travel writer J. Maarten Troost, at one point in his humorous 2007 Vanuatu memoir Getting Stoned with Savages, declared: “I hate laplap. It looks like vomit and the taste is insipidly sweet.”
Hence, it was a delightful surprise when our co-host Roslyn and her daughter Checklin (depicted below in their Uripiv Island kitchen) prepared a delicious Sunday meal of what they called “laplap sosor.”
Laplap sosor is a variation of the dish specific to the island of Malekula, and it features coconut cream-covered meat piled in the middle of the yam-paste pudding. Diners tear off the bready bits of the baked pudding, dip it into the puddle of coconut milk, and eat it with whichever meat (in our case, chicken) has been baked into the mixture.
Admittedly, laplap sosor still isn’t all that photogenic, but Kiki and I found it downright delectable.
Note: “Dispatches” are short vignettes, profiles, and mini-essays written and posted from the road, often in tandem with my Instagram account. I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page.
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