Also callaloo, calalú (see also amaranth), dasheen bush or bush (West Indian), luau (Hawaiian), elephant ears
As the words callaloo, luau, and elephant ears indicate, x taro leaves have an identity distinct from the starchy corm. The two parts rarely share a cooking pot, but they do have common properties—as I learned the hard way.
It is well known that chewing raw or undercooked taro delivers a sharp dose of needle-like calcium oxalate crystals (and other irritants) to the tongue and throat. Having queried the vendors who sold the leaves and perused some twenty books on the subject, I still had found little more advice than “cook like spinach”, “boil in two changes of water”, “cook until very tender”, and “add fat to take away the sting.” But years of cooking and eating the corms had made me fairly comfortable about cooking up the big leaves.
Imagine my panic when, with tingling tongue and tightening throat (after having double-boiled the leaves, added 10 minutes to “until tender”, and cooked them with coconut milk), I belatedly read in Rachel Laudan’s thoughtful book The Food of Paradise that taro leaves, “like every other part of the plant . . . have to be cooked for 45 minutes to an hour to destroy the calcium oxalate crystals.” I lived to tell the tale and retest the recipes, but please hear this: Ignore recipes that call for short cooking; instead, favor the deliciously melting consistency—and undeniably drab hue—of very cooked leaves.
Having escaped the irritants, you may still find yourself in a callaloo quagmire. “Callaloo” and its variations (calíalo, calalo, calilu, caruru, etc.) are words used to describe the leaves of taro, of yautía, of various amaranths, and of a soup made from all, some, or none of them. There are more versions of the soup than spellings of the word for it. When recipes call for callaloo, most any leafy greens will make a good soup—but be sure to cook taro leaves long enough.
The word “callaloo” is as tricky to pin down as the soups themselves. Various English and Spanish dictionaries define it only as a tropical American plant but do not supply the usual genus and species or give its origin. André Nègre, in his culinary history Les Antilles et Guyane à travers leur cuisine, offers these three possibilities: The term comes from “calao”, a word of Carib origin meaning a kind of leafy soup; the term was imported from Africa by the Portuguese and is still used on the Ivory Coast and Dahomey; or, it comes from Oceania, where taro is also called callaloo and is widely used.
