A Maori oven consisting of a hollow in the earth in which food is cooked on heated stones.
‘I know how to prepare an umu or earth oven.’
‘Food is prepared in an umu, an oven dug in the earth and filled with firewood and basalt rocks.’
‘In an out-door pit that Tongans call an umu, a whole pig is roasted with foods like chicken, fish, meat, sweet potatoes, fish and taro (a starchy tuber).’
‘The feast is overflowing with pork, delivered whole on spits from underground umu ovens.’
‘Similar ovens were constructed by the Maori in New Zealand but, although they were called umu ti, the plant baked was a different species, the New Zealand cabbage tree, Cordyline australis.’
Origin
Maori.
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