Poke's Passage from Canoe to Counter

Poke begins in the Polynesian settlement of Hawaiʻi, dated by current radiocarbon work to about 1000–1200 CE, when voyagers in double-hulled canoes arrived with the plants and animals they needed to live on islands that offered fish, shellfish, limu and birds but few edible plants. The word itself means to slice or cut crosswise into pieces, and the dish it names grew from the fisher's habit of cutting fresh fish and seasoning it with what the shore and the garden supplied. Its path to the plate-lunch counter and the supermarket case runs through the whole of Hawaiian history.

The settlers brought with them kalo (Colocasia esculenta), ʻulu (Artocarpus altilis), niu (Cocos nucifera), ʻuala (Ipomoea batatas), kō (Saccharum officinarum), maiʻa (Musa), kukui (Aleurites moluccanus) and the pig, the dog and the fowl, and the staple they made of kalo, baked and pounded into paʻiʻai and thinned with water into poi, remained the centre of the Native Hawaiian table. In the Kumulipo tradition Hāloanakalaukapalili, the stillborn first son of Wākea and Hoʻohōkūkalani, became the first kalo, and his younger brother Hāloa the first Hawaiian, so that the plant was kin and not merely food. The land was divided into ahupuaʻa, wedges running from the mountain to the reef, so that each community drew upon upland forest, irrigated loʻi kalo, shore and fishpond, the loko iʻa, and exchanged what each zone produced. Fish was eaten raw, dried or cooked in the imu, and the early seasonings were paʻakai, sea salt, ʻinamona made from roasted kukui kernel, and limu, which are the foundation of what poke later became. The kapu system governed who might eat what and with whom, and the ʻaikapu, its eating rules, separated men from women at the meal and kept certain foods from women altogether. Liholiho, with Kaʻahumanu and Keōpūolani, ended the ʻaikapu in 1819 with the ʻai noa, and the American Board missionaries who arrived in 1820 found the old order already broken. Captain James Cook had come to the islands in 1778, and the whalers and traders who followed brought salt, iron, cattle and new tastes to the ports. Kamehameha III invited vaqueros, the paniolo, in the 1830s, and with them came a ranching tradition of beef and salted meat. Sugar then reshaped the islands, and after 1852 the plantations drew labour from China, followed by the Japanese government contract workers from 1885 (the Gannenmono of 1868 having come first), the Portuguese from Madeira and the Azores from 1878, the Puerto Ricans in 1900–1901, the Koreans from 1903 and the Filipino sakada from 1906, with Okinawans among the Japanese arrivals. In the cane fields and the camps these workers carried rice, shoyu, pickles, sausage, noodles and dried fish into a shared lunch pail, and from that pail grew the plate lunch, the plantation's child, with its rice, macaroni salad and a main dish drawn from several kitchens. Poke took in the same changes, as onion, shoyu and sesame oil joined the older salt, ʻinamona and limu, and the Hawaiian chilli (Capsicum frutescens) and later pepper flakes added heat. The overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1893, annexation in 1898 and statehood in 1959 changed the politics of the islands and left the local table as a place where the several peoples of Hawaiʻi ate in common. The Hawaiʻi Regional Cuisine movement, founded by twelve chefs in 1991, set out to give island-grown produce and island-caught fish a place on restaurant menus, and it fixed the idea that the islands had a cuisine of their own. Poke, long sold by the pound from the fish counter, was carried by that tide from the canoe and the shore to the counter, and from there far beyond the islands, in forms that often keep only the name.

The older table was seasoned with paʻakai, ʻinamona and limu, and eaten with poi, ʻuala and fish raw, dried or cooked in the imu. The plantation years added shoyu, rice, pickles and the sweet-salt balance of the plate lunch, and poke at the counter holds both layers, with fresh ʻahi or heʻe cut and dressed to order and served with rice or on its own.