Kō — Sugar-Cane Juice

Kō, sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum), came to Hawaiʻi in the canoes of the Polynesian settlers, who carried it among the plants they brought across the Pacific, and it was grown in the Native Hawaiian garden and the edges of the loʻi long before any mill stood on the islands. It was chewed and its juice drunk fresh, and the stalk was used in the kitchen and the field as a sweetener and as a plant of the canoe-borne agriculture. From the nineteenth century cane became the plantation crop that reshaped the islands, and the labour that worked it, Chinese from 1852, Japanese, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, Korean and Filipino, brought to the juice its own habits of drinking cane pressed cold from the stalk. The juice therefore belongs to two histories at once, the Polynesian plant and the plantation field.

Kō juice is the raw liquid pressed from the peeled or scraped stalk of Saccharum officinarum, with no boiling, no added sugar and no fermentation. Fresh, it is pale green to straw-grey, lightly cloudy, sweet without being heavy, with a grassy, faintly mineral edge. It is drunk cold, often over ice, and a squeeze of lime or a slice of ginger is the only addition the local table makes. It oxidises quickly, darkening and turning flat within hours, and so it is a drink pressed to order rather than bottled. The same juice, boiled down, becomes the syrup and sugar of the plantation, and fermented and distilled it is the root of the cane spirits that sit elsewhere in this chapter.

Kō juice is drunk on its own, cold, and beside salt and acid foods: a plate of fried reef fish, pickled mango, li hing mui, or the salted and smoked meats of the plate lunch. The structural reason is contrast. Its clean sweetness and faint green bitterness cleanse the palate of salt, fat and fry without the weight of a syrup, and a little lime or ginger lifts it against rich food. It is poorly matched with dishes already sweet, where its subtlety is lost.