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Abstract
When the author arrived in Hawaii in the mid-1980s, the homegrown model of culinary evolution was widely, if tacitly, accepted. It assumes that cuisines develop in place, evolving from simple peasant cooking of local ingredients to refined high cuisine in cities. Hawaii, where successive waves of migrants had introduced and naturalized cuisines from distant places, was a striking exception to the model. The alternative naturalized model provided the key to writing a global food history, which, in turn, shed new light on Hawaii’s place in food history.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Hi’ilei Hobart for inviting me to reflect on how I came to write The Food of Paradise, for her patience as I struggled to reconstruct the state of food studies in the 1980s, and for her careful editing.
Notes
1. Rachel Laudan, The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996). Neither in my book nor in this article have I chosen to insert diacriticals on Hawaiian words. My reason is that I want to make the text as easy as possible for readers to understand. Few readers of either have any knowledge of the Hawaiian language and adding diacriticals makes words already familiar in English seem strange and distant. So for these readers I use Hawaii, not Hawai’i, just as I would use Mexico, not México. If I were writing for native speakers or those learning the language, then I would consider the use of diacriticals essential.
2. Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013).
3. Francine du Plessix Gray, Hawaii: The Sugar-Coated Fortress, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1972); Richard L. Rapson, Fairly Lucky You Live Hawaii!: Cultural Pluralism in the Fiftieth State (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1980); Randall W. Roth, James Mak, and Jack P. Suyderhoud, eds., The Price of Paradise: Lucky We Live Hawaii (Honolulu: Ku Pa’a Pub, 1992).
4. Chinese migrants from Guangdong had introduced rice, may have run the first sugar mills, and practiced as bakers using skills they had learned in the Treaty Ports. Susan Kim, ed., We Go Eat a Mixed Plate from Hawaii’s Food Culture (Honolulu, Hawaii: Hawaii Council for the Humanities, 2008).
5. Edward D. Beechert, Working in Hawaii: A Labor History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985); Ronald T. Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983).
6. Rachel Laudan, ed., The Nature of Technological Knowledge: Are Models of Scientific Change Relevant? (Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1984); Thomas Parke Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
7. Eleanor C. Nordyke, The Peopling of Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1977); John F. MacDermott, Thomas W. Maretzki, and Wen-Shing Tseng, eds., People and Cultures of Hawaii: A Psychocultural Profile (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980); Lawrence H. Fuchs, Hawaii Pono: A Social History (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984).
8. The state of anthropology and history of food at the time is usefully summarized in Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine, and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), chap. 2; K. C. Chang, ed., Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); E. N. Anderson, The Food of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
9. Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).
10. Jackie Newman’s Flavor and Fortune (1994 on) was a wealth of information about Chinese traditions little known in the United States. I was delighted to be able to contribute a short piece on crack seed, a Hawaiian dried, salted fruit snack of Chinese origin. R. W. (Bob) Lucky’s Asian Foodbookery (1996 on), with its historical extracts and personal observations, made it quite clear that distinct, unchanging national cuisines were no more than a myth. Other important newsletters were Ed Behr’s Art of Eating (1986–), which concentrated on fine dining and Sandy Oliver’s Food History News (1989 on), which concentrated on the mainland United States.
11. The Boston Culinary Historians was founded in 1980 in Boston by Barbara Wheaton and Joyce Toomre, who was to publish Classic Russian Cooking: Elena Molokhovets’ A Gift to Young Housewives (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press) in 1992. It was followed in 1983 by the Ann Arbor group, at the instigation of the antiquarian cookbook dealer and historian of American community cookbooks, Jan Longone, and the New York Culinary Historians in 1985. A talk to the latter group gave me a chance to try out my ideas about three diasporas and fusion foods, as well as treating them to Spam musubi and other Local delicacies. There I met a kindred spirit in Cara de Silva, then pioneering writing on immigrant foods of New York in New York Newsday. When I was at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at the University of Princeton and the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies in 1994–5, I noticed that Betty Fussell’s recently published book The Story of Corn (New York: Knopf, 1993), mentioned that she done her PhD at the university. With this tenuous connection, I ventured to write to her to ask if anyone else in the New York area was working on food history. A week later I was sitting in her book-lined apartment in Greenwich Village. She introduced me to Elizabeth Andoh, An American Taste of Japan (New York: William Morrow, 1985) and Raymond Sokolov.
12. Tom Jaine, “Obituary: Alan Davidson,” Guardian, accessed June 29, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/dec/04/guardianobituaries.food. When I plucked up my courage to send him a letter asking if he would be interested in a piece on Hawaii’s food for PPC, I received an enthusiastic midnight call.
13. Wall Street Journal Leisure editor, cookbook author, and food historian Ray Sokolov had already been thinking along similar lines. He put me to the test by taking me to a then still-exotic-on-the-mainland Korean restaurant but after nearly a decade in Hawaii it was a breeze. Raymond A. Sokolov, Why We Eat What We Eat: How the Encounter between the New World and the Old Changed the Way Everyone on the Planet Eats (New York: Summit Books, 1991).
14. Virginia K. Bartlett, Pickles and Pretzels: Pennsylvania’s World of Food (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980).
15. Mary Taylor Simeti, On Persephone’s Island: A Sicilian Journal (New York: Knopf, 1986).
16. Judith Midgley Kirkendall, “Hawaiian Ethnogastronomy: The Development of a Pidgin-Creole Cuisine,” PhD dissertation, University of Hawaii, 1985.
17. I am aware of the problems of the term “ethnic.” However, this was common usage at the time. Besides, a satisfactory alternative to the storefront restaurants and small shops of recent immigrants has yet to be found.
18. Accessed June 15 2016. http://www.hawaii.edu/satocenter/pace/pace_news/7-charlene.htm. Wanda A. Adams, The Island Plate: 150 Years of Recipes and Food Lore from the Honolulu Advertiser (Island Heritage Publishing, 2006).
19. Doreen Fernandez, Sarap: Essays on Philippine Food (Aduana, Intramuros, Manila: Mr. & Ms. Pub. Co, 1988).
20. “Isabella Abbott,” Accessed June 15, 2016. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/december/izzie-abbott-obit-120710.html.
21. Joan Clark, Honolulu Advertiser, December 25, 1996; D10,9; Anne Mendelson, “Aloha, food fusion,” Los Angles Times, June 18, 1997.
22. William McNeill, A World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1976); McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
23. Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972).
24. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1.
25. “Jerry H. Bentley (1949–2012),” American Historical Association, accessed August 2, 2015, http://blog.historians.org/2012/07/jerry-h-bentley-19492012/; Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Jerry H. Bentley and Herbert F. Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000).
26. Peter Farb and George J Armelagos, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980); Elisabeth Rozin, Ethnic Cuisine: The Flavor-Principle Cook-Book (Lexington, MA: S. Greene Press, 1983).
27. Kaori O’Connor, “The Hawaiian Luau: Food As Tradition, Transgression, Transformation and Travel,” Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 11, no. 2 (June 1, 2008), 4–7; Laudan, Cuisine and Empire, 43–7, for the philosophy and practice of culinary feasts.
28. For the foods of other parts of this diaspora, see Nancy J. Pollock, These Roots Remain: Food Habits in Islands of the Central and Eastern Pacific Since Western Contact (Laie, Hawaii; Honolulu, Hawaii: Institute for Polynesian Studies, 1992); Helen Leach, From Kai to Kiwi Kitchen: New Zealand’s Culinary Traditions and Cookbooks (Dunedin, New Zealand: Otago University Press, 2010), chap. 1; Patrick Vinton Kirch and Jean-Louis Rallu, The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies Archaeological and Demographic Perspectives (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007) . Gwen Skinner, The Cuisine of the South Pacific (Auckland: HarperCollins, 1985); Jennifer Brennan, Tradewinds and Coconuts: A Reminiscence and Recipes from the Pacific Islands (Boston: Periplus) 2000.
29. Storrs L. Olson and Helen F. James, “Fossil Birds from the Hawaiian Islands: Evidence for Wholesale Extinction by Man Before Western Contact,” Science 217, no. 4560 (August 13, 1982): 633–35.
30. 40. Laudan, Cuisine and Empire, 35–6.
31. The menu comes from a printed version that I purchased at Iolani Palace during my time in Hawaii. For other Kalakaua menus, see Rachel Laudan, “Two Reasons Why I Am Interested in What King Kalakaua of Hawaii Ate,” Rachel Laudan, accessed June 7, 2015, http://www.rachellaudan.com/2014/01/two-reasons-why-i-am-interested-in-what-king-kalakaua-of-hawaii-ate.html.
32. Others came too, such as Mexicans from California, then still part of Mexico; imported plants such as mangoes and avocadoes increased the range of fruits and vegetables.
33. Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 55–60.
34. “2010 Census—Honolulu CCD Population,” United States Census Bureau, Population Division, April 1, 2010.
35. See Maurizio Peleggi, Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Image (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002) for consumption, and David Thompson, Thai Food (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2002), for their clever use of French cuisine.
36. Laudan, Cuisine and Empire, 2013, 289–90.
37. Maili Yardley, Hawaii Cooks (Rutland, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 1970), 18.
38. For the complex history of the luau, see O’Connor, “The Hawaiian Luau,” op. cit., 149–72.
39. David Livingston Crawford, Hawaii’s Crop Parade: A Review of Useful Products Derived from the Soil in the Hawaiian Islands, Past and Present (Honolulu, Hawaii: Advertiser Pub. Co., 1937), 287; 217–18.
40. Arnold Hiura, Rao Huo, and Dawn Sakamoto Paiva, From Kau Kau to Cuisine: An Island Cookbook, Then and Now (Honolulu: Watermark Pub., 2013).
41. Katherine Bazore, Hawaiian and Pacific Foods; a Cook Book of Culinary Customs and Recipes Adapted for the American Hostess (New York: M. Barrows, 1947).
42. Shelley Sang-Hee Lee and Rick Baldoz, “‘A Fascinating Interracial Experiment Station’: Remapping the Orient–Occident Divide in Hawai’i,” American Studies 49, no. 3 (2008): 87–109; Lawrence H. Fuchs, Hawaii Pono: A Social History (New York: Harcourt, 1961).
43. John P. Rosa, “Local Story: The Massie Case Narrative and the Cultural Production of Local Identity in Hawai’i,” Amerasia Journal 26, no. 2 (January 1, 2000): 93–115.
44. http://ethics.hawaii.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/LegislativeAllowanceFunds.pdf, p. 15, retrieved 20 April 2015. Food of Paradise, 69.
45. Pat Sasaki, Douglas Simonson, and Ken Sakata, Pupus to Da Max (Honolulu, Hawaii: Bess Press, 1986).
46. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995).
47. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/upshot/where-people-in-each-state-were-born.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0#Hawaii, accessed August 20, 2014.
48. For a review of these developments, Paul Lyons, “‘They Will Eat Us Up’: Remembering Hawai’i,” American Literary History 16, no. 3 (2004): 543–57.
49. Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008).
50. Personal communication, Lori Wong, Food Business Feasibility Planner, Windward Community College, November 11, 2014.
51. http://ny.eater.com/2015/4/24/8490575/hawaiian-food-nyc-where-to-eat, accessed April 24, 2014.