Among pre-contact Māori, a meal has no starter, main course, or dessert. Everything cooks together in the umu (or hāngī), a pit oven dug into the ground where red-hot stones produce slow steam; roots, birds, fish, and ferns are layered on the stones, covered with leaves and earth, and left to cook. Then people eat with their hands, sitting together, according to rank and the rules of tapu: certain foods, certain hands, certain fires are sacred and separate from noa (ordinary) things. The hākari, the great feast, marks deaths, alliances, and seasons.

The iconic technique: no pot, no oil, but volcanic stones heated in a pit, sprinkled with water, which steam foods wrapped in leaves. It is the oven of the earth itself — the same into which, according to myth, the living return when they enter Te Pō.