An exotic pear in an exotic dish.

We are now awash with Avocado pears but I well remember seeing, and eating, my very first one. It was 1965 and I was a student  in Aberdeen. A friend and I were walking home up Union Street and spied this strange and extraordinarily expensive fruit in a greengrocer's window. We bought it and were surprised to find that it was neither sweet nor juicy and quite unlike any other pear that we had ever tasted!

So, in celebration of that memorable day I present you with an avocado sitting on a rather special Fijian wooden dish, known as a daveniyaqona vakaga.

The Wesleyan missionary the Rev. Thomas Williams, was the principal authority upon the state of society among the Fijians when Europeans first came into contact with them. With his wife and a few other dedicated colleagues he conducted his ministry in the considerable hardship and danger of the cannibal islands of Fiji between 1840 and 1852. He described his experiences in Fiji and the Fijians: The Islands and their inhabitants published in 1858. In the book he illustrated a dish of similar style and described it as a priest's inspirational yaqona dish in duck form, in Fijian a daveniyaqona vakaga, used within the Spirit Temple. Yaqona, a mildly narcotic brew made from the plant Piper methysticum was drunk from the dish by the bete, the priest, via a straw.