Sago jelly, more likely. I like to quote Kulick & Terrill’s Grammar and Dictionary of Tayap for a description of this unmissable food:Raholeun wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 11:10 am Bro, are you kidding me? If I ever get called in the middle of the night by a +675 phone number, you bet I am picking up. The chance of Tok Pisin' with my new friend, twirling the telephone wire while discussing sago grub recipes till the sun comes up is not to miss.
Sago is the staple food of Gapun. It is eaten every single day of the year, ideally a least twice a day; once in the morning and once in the late afternoon. Its raw form is a flour that resembles compacted corn starch. This flour (muna) can be made into a kind of rubbery pancake (tamwai) by heating it on a broken pot shard (pambram) or a frying pan, it can be tossed onto the fire raw in a tennis ball- sized chunk (muna kokɨr, which literally means ‘sago head’), it can be wrapped in a leaf and cooked in on a fire (paŋgɨp), or it can be crumbled into a bamboo tube and thrown onto a fire to congeal (munakumund). Its most common and most appreciated form, though, is as what, in English, is usually misleadingly called ‘sago pudding’ or ‘sago jelly’. Both designations are misleading because they imply (a) that said food item that has the consistency of pudding or jelly, and (b) that said food item is appetizing.
Both these implications are false. In fact, the texture of sago referred to by ‘sago jelly’ is much closer to slime or phlegm than it is to jelly or pudding. Its consistency is such that some of a mouthful will be in your mouth; at the same time some of it will be hanging down into your throat, like a long thick sputum. And appetizing, alas, ‘sago jelly’ is not – unless, of course, one happens to be a Sepik villager raised on it from birth (villagers in Gapun start feeding their babies sago jelly only a few days after they are born). The color of ‘sago jelly’ varies from light pink to dark red or even black, depending on the quality and character of the water in which it was leached.
‘Sago jelly’ (mum) is served in plates or washbasins in big viscous globs. On top of such a glob, women will place a few leaves of some vegetable, or a small piece of fish or tiny chunk of meat – like a cherry on top of an ice cream sundae (although, again, that image is deceptive because it suggests something tasty). On top of that, a few spoonfuls of ‘soup’ (wawan) will be poured. ‘Soup’ consists of coconut milk (i.e. the liquid produced when a coconut is grated and squeezed in cold water) in which the vegetables or meat served on top of the mum has been boiled. If the villagers have salt, they will use copious amounts of it to flavor the soup. Aside from salt, no flavorings, spices or herbs of any kind are used in Gapun’s cuisine.
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