The Potluck and the Backyard Party

The potluck of Hawaiʻi belongs to the plantation era, when Chinese, Japanese, Okinawan, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, Korean and Filipino workers, arriving between 1852 and 1906, lived and worked alongside one another and the Native Hawaiian community. Each group kept its own kitchen, and the gatherings of the camps and of the families that came after them are where those kitchens first shared a table. Kysar, in Aloha Kitchen, reads local food as she reads pidgin: a hybrid language of the plantations that cannot be assigned to one people.

The backyard party is the everyday form of the island table, set against the lūʻau of the great occasion. A household hosts, but it does not cater: each family brings the dish it is known for, and the table is made of those dishes. Kysar notes that Japanese food may stand beside Filipino and Chinese food at the same party, and that a plate of chili may be served from the same counter as Spam musubi and saimin. No single ethnic group can be credited with the whole; the combination is what makes the food local. Certain dishes recur because they suit the form. Lumpia Shanghai, the thin, tightly rolled and deep-fried Filipino pork roll, came with the sakada workers and is the dominant lumpia of the islands, eaten as finger food and taken from the tray as fast as it is set down. Fried wontons of pork, shrimp and water chestnut, of Chinese origin, are passed round in the same way, and they may be frozen uncooked and later boiled into saimin or soup. Musubi and rolled sushi, which can be largely prepared the day before, bring the Japanese kitchen to the same table. Butter mochi is the sweet that Kysar calls a mainstay of any island party. It is a chewy, dense cake of glutinous rice flour, eggs, sugar and coconut milk, cut into small squares. Its crust is crisp and golden on the first day and softens by the next, so it keeps well for a party. The labour is shared as well: the rolling is given to friends and family, and the preparation becomes a gathering of its own before the party proper. For Kysar the matter is not only history. The dishes come down through families, and the great-grandparents who cooked them on the plantations are present at the table through the recipes. The potluck is therefore the place where the plantation inheritance is still handed on, plate by plate, rather than a custom recalled from the past.

The potluck table is built on contrast: savoury fried pork rolls and wontons, rice seasoned with vinegar and sugar, shoyu-dressed tuna and pickled carrot, and the sweet, chewy richness of butter mochi. Dishes are taken from the tray by hand and eaten from a paper plate, hot or at room temperature, and rice is nearly always present. Many of the dishes are made ahead and keep well, so that the host's work is done before the guests arrive.