Not long ago, my 73-year-old Aunty Elaine, a lifelong Honolulu resident who stands 4‘11 with shoes on, was busted for trying to mail us lychee fruit bought ripe off the back of a truck. Days later, the box arrived in my family’s Seattle home, empty save for a slip of paper notifying us that sending uninspected fruit to the mainland is illegal.
Who can blame us for missing the flavors of the islands, especially these days? My mom’s lineage is Japanese American from Hawai‘i, and for as long as I can remember, we’ve always returned home from our visits there with suitcases filled with products that transport us right back again: dried fruit covered with sweet-tart li hing mui powder; creamy lilikoi butter; lighter-than-air guava chiffon cake (yes, an entire cake); pillowy taro-flavored sweet rolls; plump Portuguese sausage; and that tender pork and taro leaf packet known as laulau.
These flavors serve as more than souvenirs. When we’re buttering our toast with lilikoi butter, we’re tasting one of the flavors that defines the multicultural landscape from which we came, a unique confluence of Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Korean and Filipino cultures, among others. Over the generations, each immigrant group imported and grew its own produce on the islands, learning to share one other’s traditions while paying homage to distinct lineages.
“To understand local food in Hawai’i, you have to look at what the building blocks are,” says Alana Kysar, the author of the cookbook Aloha Kitchen. “Each ingredient is unique to the culture that brought it here, but Hawai’i has its own food culture that encompasses all of these different groups.”
Every Hawai‘i resident can tell you how this diversity manifests in his or her daily life. My Japanese American family reads our Chinese horoscope each year, and we’ve always had Korean kimchi in the fridge next to the ketchup. Chef Sheldon Simeon, who was born on the Island of Hawai’i and now lives on Maui, where he runs the restaurant Tin Roof, is Filipino American, but the Polynesian dish of laulau is a family holiday tradition, and his kids play old Hawai’ian songs on the ukulele, an instrument brought over by the Portuguese.
When it comes to Hawaiians, “we’re all about the ohana — the family — and sharing with one another, and that’s the way we like to eat, too,” says the James Beard Award-nominated Simeon, whose new cookbook, Cook Real Hawai‘i, is out in March. “There’s no competitiveness among the cultures here. We’re stoked when we can share each other’s values, and that’s how it is on the table.”
Missing the generous diversity of the Hawaiian table, I recently put together a fantasy shopping list. To make sure that I’m prepared for my next visit, whenever that may be, I sourced all the items with the help of Simeon, Kysar, and my Aunty Elaine, who swears she’ll never cross the Department of Agriculture again.
Manapua
The Hawaiian version of char siu bao, or Cantonese steamed pork buns, arrived in the 1800’s, when Chinese plantation workers both ate and sold them in the fields. Over two centuries later, the Hawaiian-style buns are sweeter and bigger. (The word manapua is derived from a Hawai’ian phrase meaning “delicious pork thing.”) When Kysar is passing through O’ahu on her way back home to L.A., the historic Chinatown restaurant Char Hung Sut is on her list of musts: “They have the biggest, most fluffy, magical manapua,” she explains. “I take a box to freeze, and then I make sure I have extra on the side to eat on the flight.” My Aunty Elaine is also a fan of the baked version of char siu bao at the Honolulu restaurant Royal Kitchen.
