Church and Hālau Feasts

The church and hālau feast belongs to the Hawaiʻi of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after the ʻai noa of 1819 ended the eating rules of the ʻaikapu under Liholiho, with Kaʻahumanu and Keōpūolani, and men and women could eat together. The American Board missionaries arrived in 1820, and the congregation soon became one of the settled places where a community gathered to eat. The hālau, the school of hula, kept its own table beside it, and the two share one purpose: to feed a gathering from the labour of its own members.

The church feast and the hālau feast are the lūʻau's working cousins. They are given not for a chief or for a child's first year but for a purpose, whether the dedication of a building, the close of a season, a performance, or the raising of money for a roof, a trip or a uniform. The cooking is shared out among families, each of which brings what it knows. The Hawaiian table of kālua pig, laulau, poi and lomi salmon sits beside the dishes of the plantation kitchens, so that a single long table may carry rice, chow fun, Portuguese sweet bread, Japanese chicken and Filipino pancit. The feast therefore records, dish by dish, who belongs to the congregation or the hālau. The fundraiser is the form in which these feasts reach the wider community. Huli huli chicken is the plainest case. Provenance research records that in 1955 a Portuguese-Hawaiian poultry man used his mother's teriyaki-like sauce to barbecue chicken for a farmers' gathering, and that the crowd's call to turn the birds gave the dish its name. Schools, churches, hula hālau and sports teams have since raised money by selling it. The method is simple and fits a car park or a church yard: halves of chicken are marinated in a sweet-savoury sauce of soy sauce, brown sugar, ginger and garlic, held between hinged grill baskets over kiawe wood Prosopis pallida, turned again and again and basted until the skin is lacquered and the meat stays moist. The original sauce was never released, and every group that sells the chicken works from an approximation of its own. The work is divided as it is in any large kitchen. Some members dig and fire the imu, some wrap laulau in kī Cordyline fruticosa and lūʻau leaf, some pound and thin the poi, and others cook the rice and the plantation dishes by the tray. Plates are filled in a line and carried to long tables, where the older members are served first. Eating together across the old divisions is itself the inheritance of 1819, and the church hall and the hālau yard are places where it is practised weekly rather than remembered.

The feast table sets heat against cool: the smoky, sweet, sticky chicken from the kiawe fire against the cool, sour-edged poi and the room-temperature lomi salmon. Rice is always present, and the kālua pig, salty and soft from the imu, is eaten with it. Dishes of the Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese and Filipino kitchens are set alongside, and there is usually a sweet end of haupia or kūlolo. Everything is served on a plate or in a paper tray, often eaten standing or on folding chairs, and the quantity is judged so that every guest leaves with food to carry home.