The Polynesian Arrival and the Canoe Plants

Polynesian voyagers reached the Hawaiian archipelago in double-hulled canoes, and current radiocarbon work places settlement at about 1000 to 1200 CE. The settlers are held to have come in waves, from the Marquesas and later from Tahiti, and they arrived on islands that had never been inhabited. The same Polynesian voyaging tradition later reached Aotearoa, at about 1250 to 1300 CE, which is why the cooking of the two places shares so much of its root.

The islands the voyagers found were rich in fresh water, fish, shellfish, limu and birds, but poor in plants a household could live on; there were some ferns and fruits, and little else. The settlers therefore carried their food with them, in the canoes, as living cuttings, tubers and seed, together with chickens, dogs and pigs. More than twenty plants made the crossing, and they are known today as the canoe plants: kalo (Colocasia esculenta), ʻulu (Artocarpus altilis), ʻuala (Ipomoea batatas), niu (Cocos nucifera), kō (Saccharum officinarum), maiʻa (Musa), ʻōhiʻa ʻai (Syzygium malaccense), kukui (Aleurites moluccanus), and also pia (arrowroot), ʻōlena (turmeric) and ʻawapuhi (ginger). Each was a deliberate choice, since a voyage of this length could carry only what would be planted again on arrival. Of these, kalo stood first. In the Kumulipo tradition Hāloanakalaukapalili, the stillborn first son of Wākea and Hoʻohōkūkalani, became the first kalo, and his younger brother Hāloa became the first Hawaiian; the plant is therefore an elder sibling of the people and not merely a crop. The corm was baked until tender and pounded with a little water into paʻiʻai, a dense and portable mass, and further water turned paʻiʻai into poi. Grown in the irrigated terraces of the loʻi kalo, it remained the staple of the early diet and remains a mainstay of the table. Around the starch the cooking was plain and exact. Fish and other seafood, land birds, ʻuala and ʻulu were seasoned with paʻakai, the sea salt, and with ʻinamona, the relish of roasted, mashed kukui nut kernel and salt. Limu, gathered from the same reef as the fish, joined many dishes as the link between shore and sea. Food was cooked in the imu, the earth oven, and fish were raised in the loko iʻa, the fishponds, so that the settlers' agriculture and aquaculture together made a complete provision from a land that had offered little at first. The plants that the modern table takes for granted are not part of this inheritance. Chillies, pineapple and coffee are post-contact, as are the cattle, the wheat and the many kitchens of the plantation era. The canoe plants are therefore the base layer on which every later arrival was set, and the reading of Hawaiian cooking begins with what the first canoes carried.

The early Hawaiian table was built on the mild, faintly sour starch of poi and the sweetness of roasted ʻuala and ʻulu, set against salt, seafood and limu. Paʻakai and ʻinamona gave seasoning, the second with the oil and bitterness of the roasted kukui kernel. Food was baked in the imu, wrapped in leaves, and eaten from the hand, with the starch as the centre of the meal and the fish or bird as its accompaniment.