The Opening of the Imu

The imu is the Hawaiian earth oven, a pit dug in the ground, lined with stones heated in a fire, and closed over with leaves and earth. It belongs to the Polynesian settlers who reached Hawaiʻi about 1000–1200 CE and brought with them the means of cooking food in the earth, as the same ancestral people carried the oven to Aotearoa around 1250–1300 CE. The opening of the imu, when the covering is drawn back and the food is lifted out, is the moment on which a Hawaiian feast turns, and it is the part of the lūʻau that has changed least.

The imu is built before the feast and judged at its end. A pit is dug, and a fire of dry wood is laid over a bed of stones, commonly basalt, which are left until they have taken the heat and the wood has burned down. The stones are spread, and the food is laid on them under layers of leaves: banana leaves of maiʻa (Musa), and the leaves of kī (ti, Cordyline fruticosa), which also wrap the food itself. Over the leaves go wet sacking or mats, and then earth, so that no steam escapes and no smoke reaches the food. The pit is then left for many hours. What is cooked in it is the food of the Hawaiian table: the whole pig, which is the centre of the kālua, a word meaning to cook in an underground oven; the laulau of pork and fish folded in lūʻau leaves and bundled in ti leaf; ʻulu (breadfruit, Artocarpus altilis); ʻuala (sweet potato, Ipomoea batatas); and kalo (taro, Colocasia esculenta), the plant from which poi is made. In the Kumulipo tradition kalo is the elder brother of the first Hawaiian, Hāloa, born of Hāloanakalaukapalili, the stillborn first son of Wākea and Hoʻohōkūkalani, and the plant is treated with the regard owed to a kinsman. The oven that cooks it is therefore a working part of a lineage, not only a method. The opening is done by those who built the imu, and with order. The earth and mats are drawn off, the leaves are lifted, and the steam that rises carries the smell of ti leaf, smoked pork and cooked kalo. The pig is lifted out on its leaves, the meat is pulled from the bone and salted with paʻakai, and the laulau are unwrapped at the table. Before 1819 the ʻaikapu, the eating rules of the kapu system, kept men and women to separate meals and forbade women pork and certain other foods. These rules ended with the ʻai noa under Liholiho (Kamehameha II), with Kaʻahumanu and Keōpūolani, when men and women ate together; the shared feast the imu serves today descends from that change. The lūʻau as it was and as it is differ most in occasion and least in the oven. The nineteenth-century feast grew from the older ʻahaʻaina, and the name lūʻau came in time to be given to the feast from the young taro tops cooked in it. On the plantations of the later nineteenth century, with Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, Korean and Filipino workers arriving in turn, the dishes of other kitchens came onto the lūʻau table beside the Hawaiian ones. The imu itself is still dug for the baby lūʻau, the wedding, the church and hālau feast, and the family gathering.

The taste of the imu is smoke that is soft rather than sharp, the salt of paʻakai, and the sweet vegetable steam of ti leaf and banana leaf. Pork from the pit is pulled from the bone and eaten with poi, the fermented kalo paste that stands against its richness with a sourness of its own, and with laulau, whose lūʻau leaf is cooked to a soft dark green. The food is served on the leaves, and at the traditional table it is eaten with the hand, with poi taken on the fingers from the shared bowl.