Bougna is a traditional feast dish of the

Kanak people The Kanak (French spelling until 1984: Canaque) are the indigenous Melanesian inhabitants of New Caledonia, an overseas collectivity of France in the southwest Pacific. According to the 2019 census, the Kanak make up 41.2% of New Caledon ...

of New Caledonia. The word "bougna" comes from the Drehu word "puhnya" meaning "bundle", "pack". Bougna often contains

taro Taro () (''Colocasia esculenta)'' is a root vegetable. It is the most widely cultivated species of several plants in the family Araceae that are used as vegetables for their corms, leaves, and petioles. Taro corms are a food staple in Afric ...

yam Yam or YAM may refer to: Plants and foods *Yam (vegetable), common name for members of ''Dioscorea'' * Taro, known in Malaysia and Singapore as yam * Sweet potato, specifically its orange-fleshed cultivars, often referred to as yams in North Amer ...

sweet potato The sweet potato or sweetpotato ('' Ipomoea batatas'') is a dicotyledonous plant that belongs to the bindweed or morning glory family, Convolvulaceae. Its large, starchy, sweet-tasting tuberous roots are used as a root vegetable. The young ...

banana A banana is an elongated, edible fruit – botanically a berry (botany), berry – produced by several kinds of large herbaceous flowering plants in the genus ''Musa (genus), Musa''. In some countries, Cooking banana, bananas used for ...

, and pieces of either

chicken The chicken (''Gallus gallus domesticus'') is a domestication, domesticated junglefowl species, with attributes of wild species such as the grey junglefowl, grey and the Ceylon junglefowl that are originally from Southeastern Asia. Rooster ...

fish Fish are aquatic, craniate, gill-bearing animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish as well as various extinct related groups. Approximately 95% ...

, crab,

prawns Prawn is a common name for small aquatic crustaceans with an exoskeleton and ten legs (which is a member of the order decapoda), some of which can be eaten. The term "prawn"Mortenson, Philip B (2010''This is not a weasel: a close look at nature' ...

lobster Lobsters are a family (Nephropidae, synonym Homaridae) of marine crustaceans. They have long bodies with muscular tails and live in crevices or burrows on the sea floor. Three of their five pairs of legs have claws, including the first pair, ...

. The contents are wrapped in

banana leaves The banana leaf is the leaf of the banana plant, which may produce up to 40 leaves in a growing cycle. The leaves have a wide range of applications because they are large, flexible, waterproof and decorative. They are used for cooking, wrappin ...

and are then buried to cook in a ground oven, which uses red-hot rocks heated by fire. After about two hours of cooking, the banana leaves are unearthed and unwrapped, and the contents are eaten.

References

New Caledonian cuisine Earth oven {{NewCaledonia-stub