The Aotearoa Thread — Imu and Hāngi, ʻUala and Kūmara

The thread begins with the voyaging settlement of eastern Polynesia and runs to the two furthest points of the Polynesian triangle. Current radiocarbon work dates the settlement of Hawaiʻi to about 1000–1200 CE and that of Aotearoa to about 1250–1300 CE. Settlers reached Hawaiʻi in waves, first from the Marquesas and later from Tahiti, and the plants and animals they carried in their canoes were the larder of both archipelagos.

The islands the voyagers found were well supplied with fresh water, fish, shellfish, limu and birds, but offered few plants that could feed a settled people beyond some ferns and fruits. The canoe plants made up that lack: niu (Cocos nucifera), kalo (Colocasia esculenta), ʻulu (Artocarpus altilis), kō (Saccharum officinarum), ʻuala (Ipomoea batatas), kukui (Aleurites moluccanus) and maʻia (Musa), with the ʻōhiʻa ʻai, pia, ʻōlena and ʻawapuhi among them, travelled alongside chickens, dogs and pigs. In Hawaiʻi the table came to rest on kalo, grown in the wet fields of the loʻi and cooked in the imu, the earth oven of heated stones. In Aotearoa the same inheritance met a cooler land. Māori grew taro in small amounts in the warm north, while kūmara, the sweet potato, became the staple, and the earth oven was kept as the hāngi. The Provenance research on the Pacific migration trail follows this kinship through the marae, where food is carried in, presented and served within tikanga, and where cooking is an act of manaakitanga, the care of guests, rather than a service rendered in a dining room. The trail names Rongo, the Māori god of kūmara and cultivated food, as the figure for whom one such meeting house, Rongomaraeroa, is named, so that the cook there works in the house of the god of food. The parallel is exact in its forms. Imu and hāngi both cook by steam and radiant heat from stones heated in a pit and covered, and both are communal in purpose, feeding gatherings larger than any one household. Kalo and kūmara stand as the root crops of their two homes, each carrying a founding story: 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. The trail records the further point that the carvings of that marae represent the whakapapa of all peoples in Aotearoa, Māori and non-Māori, a bicultural ground that Hawaiʻi shares in its own way with the plantation kitchens that came after the canoes. The later arrivals, Chinese from 1852, Portuguese from 1878, Japanese contract workers from 1885 and the Puerto Rican, Korean and Filipino waves of 1900 to 1906, added their cooking to the older table without displacing the earth oven or the root crop beneath it. That layering, an old Polynesian base with newer kitchens set upon it, is the shape this chapter follows, and the Aotearoa thread is its oldest and most direct strand.

The table of the thread is a table of roots, steam and smoke: kalo, ʻuala and kūmara cooked in the pit until soft and faintly sweet, taking an earthy savour from the stones, leaves and the fat of the meat laid above them. At the lūʻau and at the marae alike the food is served in abundance and in order, to guests first, and the sweetness of the roots sets off the saltier dishes of pork and fish beside them. Later kitchens added shoyu, rice, sweet bread and sausage to the Hawaiian plate, but the oven of heated stones remains the common method from which it is all measured.