Sugar and the Labour Waves

The sugar plantation made the local table of Hawaiʻi. Kō, Saccharum officinarum, came in the canoes of the first Polynesian settlers, but cane grown as an export crop for American and European owners in the nineteenth century drew to the islands a workforce from half the world, and the kitchens of that workforce became the cooking now called local. The Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 gave Hawaiian sugar entry to the American market and set the demand for labour that the Board of Immigration then sought to meet.

The older table stood on the canoe plants and on the land division of the ahupuaʻa, in which a district ran from the mountain to the reef and gave its people kalo from the loʻi, ʻulu and niu from the uplands, and fish from the shore and the loko iʻa. Hawaiian cooking before the plantations rested on that exchange between uplands and sea, on the imu and on the paʻakai of the salt beds, and the kapu governed who might eat what and with whom until the ʻai noa of 1819, when Liholiho, with Kaʻahumanu and Keōpūolani, ended the eating rules of the ʻaikapu. The American Board missionaries arrived in 1820, and the whaling ships that called at Honolulu and Lahaina brought salt beef, ship biscuit and new demand for provisions; Kamehameha III invited vaqueros from the 1830s, and the paniolo and their beef entered the cooking of the islands. Sugar then reorganised the land and the labour. The first Chinese workers came from 1852, and the Gannenmono of 1868 were followed by Japanese government contract workers from 1885. The Portuguese came from Madeira and the Azores from 1878, the Puerto Ricans in 1900 and 1901, the Koreans from 1903 and the Filipino sakada from 1906; Okinawan workers, counted among the Japanese arrivals, brought their own kitchen. Kysar, in Aloha Kitchen, records that Filipino labourers came in large numbers, mostly from the Ilocos region and the Visayas, and that at the height of production more than half the plantation workforce was Filipino. Arriving later, they found it easier to bring in the ingredients they wanted, and they preferred to boil, stew, broil and fry, with vinegar and garlic at the centre of their dishes, as in pork adobo. The plantation fed these groups side by side, in camps where the lunch pail and the shared field break mixed their cooking. Rice came from the Chinese and Japanese kitchens, shoyu and pickled vegetables from Japan, sweet bread and sausage from the Portuguese, and the chilli and vinegar of the Filipino and Korean tables sat alongside them. The plate lunch grew from this: rice, a hot protein and a scoop of macaroni salad, a meal that carries the plantation's cooking in one container. The plantation did not create these dishes from one tradition; it brought them to one table and one working day, and the exchange between neighbouring camps did the rest. The political history shows on the same table. The overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1893, annexation in 1898 and statehood in 1959 moved the islands step by step into American commerce, and with them came the canned luncheon meat that Spam musubi still carries, the pineapple of James Dole's company of 1901 and the supermarket shelf. Loco moco, credited to a Hilo restaurant of 1949, belongs to the same history of rice, hamburger, egg and gravy assembled from what was to hand. Hawaiʻi Regional Cuisine, begun by twelve founding chefs in 1991, turned back to island farms, fishers and ranchers, and gave the local table a language of its own.

The table the plantation left is one of salt, sweetness, acid and fat set side by side. Shoyu and pickled vegetables from the Japanese kitchen, the vinegar and garlic of Filipino adobo, the sweet bread and sausage of the Portuguese, and the chilli of the Korean and Filipino tables met the rice of the Chinese and Japanese kitchens, with macaroni salad cooling the hot protein on the plate lunch. Beneath them stood the older Hawaiian table of kalo, ʻulu, fish and paʻakai, and the beef of the paniolo and the salt beef of the whaling ships had already joined it. Cane itself gave the sweetness that runs through the local table, and the meal eaten in the camp and carried in the lunch pail is the one the islands still call their own.