Lilia’ll be hosting a sumptuous sunny Sunday brunch (from 2) once this week’s rains have run away - in her network of intertwining Homerton mews houses.

Everyone’ going on holiday and so, increasingly, are we, drifting away from mainlaind ennui towards exotic atolls and rare reefs halfway round the world, cooking and fraternising with itinerant swathes of Chinese, Futunians, Indonesians, Kanaks, Melanesians, Naurans, Ni-Vanuatu (sic), Polynesians, Tahitians, Tuvaluans, Vietnamese and Wallisians, and the odd post-colonial European...

It’s slightly scary that we’re only inches from the International Date Line’s eccentric hump in the Bering Sea. Down South the Antarctic Ice gives way to lead us towards the very pole itself while further North we’re still just In Australia, courtesy Norfolk Island, as we land at last on the Southern Island of New Zealand. We cling to the eastern Anglican edges of the Solomon Islands as we greet French culture in the islands of Vanuatu and that “overseas collectivity”, New Caledonia, where we terrestrialise in Grand Terre and the Loyalty Islands. Its name, bizarrely, refers to Scotland, though its nickname is Hawaiian and means “human/person/people” – poignant, given their one-time dietary preference (great laconic sentence: “Tensions developed into hostilities, and in 1849, the crew of the American ship Cutter were killed and eaten by the Pouma clan”). Further North is Micronesian Nauru (formerly Pleasant Island – what now?), the world’s smallest island nation, just off of Ooma, tragically isolated when its national airline went bust 4 years ago yet its coral reef prevented construction of a seaport.

We also cross the Caroline Island of Kosrae (pop: 7,686), a land burgeoning with breadfruit but whose paucity of pollinating insects means no veg, where coconut and kava are reserved for kings. And then the Marshall Islands, that ring of obscure atolls peeking like tits or ringworm above the surface (one is even called bikini), where they use those coconuts to power ships and trucks. It is the most contaminated place on earth, thanks to decades of US nuclear testing which wiped islands like Elugelab off the face of the world forever. In radiant good health we rise to Wake Island, “an unorganized, unincorporated territory” barely twice the size of its own runway, populated by personnel rather than persons, peppered with military history and traces of its favourite weekend activity, rocket testing. Thus woken we continue up to that necklace of Russian islands bounding the Bering that’ll eventually lead us to Alaska and the sanctity of the States beyond...

Nouméa or Nauru, Kingston or Norfolk Island, Port Vila or Invercargill, who’ll sail with us?
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Latitudinal Cuisine is a growing group of friends and strangers uniting around the simple concept of meeting weekly and travelling through the cuisines of the world.
We bring food from the longitude corresponding to the day of the year, this week longitude 164.
We share everything.