Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Samoan recipes, part of Oceania. This page provides links to all the Samoan recipes presented on this site, with 19 recipes in total.

This is a continuation of an entire series of pages that will, I hope, allow my visitors to better navigate this site. As well as displaying recipes by name, country and region of origin I am now planning a whole series of pages where recipes can be located by meal type and main ingredient. This page gives a listing of all the Indian recipes added to this site.

Sundays are traditionally a day of rest, and many families congregate to share an umu together for a Sunday afternoon meal. In a traditional household, the older members of the family will sit and eat first, and as the meal continues the younger members and then children are invited to eat.

These recipes, for the major part, originate in Samoa. Otherwise they are fusion recipes with major Samoan influences.

Samoa, officially the Independent State of Samoa (Malo Saʻoloto Tutoʻatasi o Sāmoa in Samoan) is an island country in Polynesia, part of Oceania, in the South Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main islands (Savai'i and Upolu), two smaller, inhabited islands (Manono and Apolima), and several smaller, uninhabited islands, including the Aleipata Islands (Nuʻutele, Nuʻulua, Fanuatapu and Namua). Samoa is located 64 km (40 mi; 35 nmi) west of American Samoa, 889 km northeast of Tonga, 1,152 km northeast of Fiji, 483 km east of Wallis and Futuna, 1,151 km southeast of Tuvalu, 519 km south of Tokelau, 4,190 km southwest of Hawaii, and 610 km northwest of Niue. The capital and largest city is Apia.

The Lapita people discovered and settled the Samoan Islands around 3,500 years ago. They developed a Samoan language and Samoan cultural identity. Because of the Samoans' seafaring skills, pre-20th-century European explorers referred to the entire island group, including American Samoa, as the'Navigator Islands'. The country became a colony of the German Empire in 1899 after the Tripartite Convention, and was known as German Samoa. German administration ended in August 1914 after New Zealand troops bloodlessly occupied the colony at the start of World War I. New Zealand officially gained control of the region as a League of Nations mandate in 1920, when it became the Territory of Western Samoa. After being converted into a United Nations Trust Territory in 1946, Western Samoa gained independence on 1 January 1962 and changed its name to just Samoa on 4 July 1997.

Samoa is a unitary parliamentary democracy with 11 administrative divisions. It was admitted to the United Nations on 15 December 1976 and the country is also a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, Non-Aligned Movement and the Pacific Islands Forum. The island's defence is responsible to the New Zealand Defence Force.

Etymology: The name of 'Samoa' means 'Holy Center', uniting a compound of the Samoan sa ('sacred') and moa ('center'). The name is alternatively derived from a local chieftain named Samoa or an indigenous word meaning 'place of the moa', a now-extinct bird.

From independence in 1962, the country was officially known as the Independent State of Western Samoa, commonly known as Western Samoa. From 4 July 1997, the country changed its name to Samoa, drawing protests from nearby American Samoa, although the former name remains in use, especially their .ws top-domain.

Samoan Cuisine:

Sundays are traditionally a day of rest, and many families congregate to share an umu together for a Sunday afternoon meal. In a traditional household, the older members of the family will sit and eat first, and as the meal continues the younger members and then children are invited to eat. The umu contains an abundance and variety of dishes ranging from a whole pig, fresh seaweed and crayfish to baked taro and rice. Coconut appears in many Samoan dishes, for example, luau, a parcel of coconut cream wrapped in taro leaves baked in the umu. This dish is eaten in its entirety including the leaves and is rich in taste due to its coconut content. The green young coconut is a main ingredient in samilolo, a kind of sauce made using the flesh and sea water that is cooked inside the nut on an open flame and then fermented, usually within the palolo fishing season.

A staple of the modern Samoan diet is pisupo, or canned corned beef. Commonly imported from New Zealand or Australia, pisupo is conventionally served alongside white rice or alaisa fa'apopo (coconut rice), combined with vegetables and noodles to make sapasui, simmered with taro leaves in coconut milk as in palusami, or mixed with supoketi (cooked spaghetti).

The word pisupo is derived from pea soup, which was one of the first canned foods introduced to the island in the 19th century. Today, the word is applied more generically to all foods preserved in cans, especially corned beef, which has become incorporated into the daily social and gastronomic life of Samoans. On occasions such as weddings and birthdays, it has become commonplace to receive cans of corned beef as gifts.