In the islands, salt comes from shoyu, and it sits on every table where other places put the salt shakers. After a day on the beach, all I wanted was ice shaved to powder, packed over sweetened adzuki beans, drenched in lychee syrup and sprinkled with li hing mui, a fluorescent red powder that gives everything from shave ice to dried mango slices a salty kick.Īnd since we're on salt again, remember my box of Morton's kosher? The "ethnic" aisle was exactly where it belonged - for Hawaii's needs. But the yin and yang of sweet-salty is also one of local food's hallmarks. It's a legacy likely from the cane fields. But in the twists of Hawaii cuisine, everything else - teriyaki sauce, the meat stuffing for Chinese buns - has just a dash more sugar than most mainlanders would probably like. Mochi and other desserts veer toward Asian sensibilities, which means they're not sweet. Add butter to rice flour and you get butter mochi, a delightfully gooey staple of theater intermissions and high school bake sales. Bite-sized morsels of pounded rice dough called mochi get stuffed with ice cream in flavors like green tea, lilikoi (passion fruit), ginger and vanilla. Rice offers a comfy bed for loco moco, the belly-busting surfer breakfast that adds a hamburger and gravy to the mix. Rice soaks up the flavor of the shoyu - soy sauce - that gets sprinkled liberally over the bowl. Like toast with your eggs? Rice mo betta. There is no bread - or at least no good bread, save the eggy, Portuguese sweet bread called pao doce. It's as though without rice you couldn't eat. It's the stuff everyday people eat every day. A bits-and-pieces cuisine, "local food" is the culinary equivalent of pidgin. It holds "hurricane popcorn," where butter is bumped for seaweed confetti and rice crackers oxtail soup smoky, greasy, kalua pig and other items known simply as "local" food. It's filled with dishes like Spam musubi - basically a giant piece of sushi, but with canned luncheon meat instead of fish - and a snack-time soup of Japanese broth and Chinese noodles called saimin. And over the decades, they shared their families, marrying to produce the most ethnically diverse state in the country, and perhaps its only real melting pot.Īnd that pot got carried into the kitchen. They shared their lunches - their noodles, their curries. In the fields, they connected their unfamiliar words with bits of English to create an enduring pidgin. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, waves of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos and Portuguese arrived to work the sugar cane and pineapple plantations. Honolulu was my home until five years ago, and I always found the "ethnic" aisle - where taco shells and pasta had also been exiled - the clearest expression of Hawaii's culture.
Midday is prime time for local food, when lunch wagons line up by office towers to dispense Styrofoam containers of 'plate lunch': heaping masses of Korean barbecued ribs, beef stew or teriyaki mackerel alongside mayonnaise-engulfed macaroni salad.
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