Aloha, Food Fusion

Not long ago I heard a panel of gastronomic gurus weightily talking about how cooks from Asia may now or in the future be influencing the way Americans eat.

Not one mentioned that many (or most) of the people they were discussing are Americans. Not one protested when several fine minds declared that the restaurant food brought by Asian immigrants will assume true significance in this country only when it stops being so damn cheap. And by the way, not one seemed to wonder what effects, if any, the assorted Asian groups now living and cooking here might be having on each other.

It’s a good thing Rachel Laudan wasn’t part of the event. Judging by what she has to say about the Hawaiian experience in her marvelous book “The Food of Paradise,” she could have given the rest of the panel an earful--or reason to cover their ears at the thought of food-based naturalizations and interchanges not sanctioned by authoritative taste makers.

Do not buy this book if you want high-powered pronouncements on “fusion cooking.” Its focus is the very different matter of actual culinary fusions.

What Laudan describes is not so much a blending as a mashing process involving the long, disorderly succession of all that was ever brought to the former Sandwich Islands by adventure, financial opportunity or servitude.

Aside from the original Polynesian-descended population and the American missionaries and entrepreneurs who arrived while the diseases introduced by 18th-century British voyagers were destroying the indigenous people, nearly every group now living in Hawaii was hauled across the Pacific between about 1850 and 1950 to labor on factory-scale plantations and later in processing plants supplying the Old and New Worlds with luxuries like sugar, pineapples and bananas.

The parade of humanity included Chinese, Japanese and Okinawans, Koreans, Portuguese from the Azores, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans and even mestizo cowboys from California who worked the cattle ranches.

As other areas nosed out Hawaii as preeminent tropical produce suppliers, all these people met and mingled with less and less attention to barriers of race or ethnic origin.

It took about 20 or 25 years after statehood (1959) for the heirs of Hawaii’s old plantation-era food traditions and a fresh crop of mainlanders to hatch a brash new culinary vernacular called “Local Food” (with a capital L) that would be the despair of any lemon grass, beurre blanc and tuna tartare aesthete.

Its monuments include a lunch wagon “plate lunch” featuring two or three scoops of sticky white rice, “fried mahi-mahi, spaghetti and meat sauce all mixed up together,” beef teriyaki, macaroni or potato salad, some kimchi and an optional ladle of (presumably canned) gravy. Mongrelization? Well, it sure ain’t test-tube gene-splicing.

With a certain amount of filling in, an expanded version of this outline can be pieced together from “The Food of Paradise,” but piecing together doesn’t appear to be Laudan’s purpose. The structure of this book is a kind of anti-chronology. Not only does it start right now with the glories of Local Foods and work back to prehistoric first principles, such as the islands’ pristine fresh water, it seems meant to be taken in as a series of small glimpses, each accompanied by its own cluster of illustrative recipes.

The disadvantages of the approach are obvious when you try to sort out apparent discrepancies on just when sugar cane got to the islands or how Filipinos were treated under the former Oriental Exclusion Act. (The scanty general index--there are also two recipe indexes--is no help.)

Laudan tends to provide only the minimal historical underpinnings for each episode, leaving the reader to reconstruct any reconstructible continuity from back to front of the book. It seems wiser to leave continuity to other historians and read her as an adroit mosaicist of the telling circumstance.

Here she wanders through a store devoted to “crack seed,” a huge and originally Chinese tribe of salt- and sugar-preserved fruit snacks; there she ponders the countless mystifying Filipino fruits and vegetables in a raucous Saturday open-air market. She bends a wryly sympathetic eye on local ways with Spam (it shows up as tempura or in the seaweed-wrapped rice balls called musubi) and after eight years in the islands is willing to consider one gallon of congee (jook) made with ham hocks and a broken-up turkey carcass a natural sequel to Thanksgiving dinner.

At intervals she supplies historical overviews of one or another issue--for example, the saga of sugar in Hawaii, or the role of mainland-trained home economists in shaking up attitudes toward once-separate cooking traditions.

Laudan makes it clear that the evolution of Local Food has nothing to do with island chefs’ current studied attempts to fabricate and publicize a “Hawaii regional cuisine,” something from which she distances herself with cool politeness. Nor does she try to isolate the purer remnants of once-distinct ethnic foodways that still survive to varying degrees in the home.

The part of the story that fascinates her is what’s “vulgar” in the old Latin sense of representing a common speech, the shared public identity that the many people of Hawaii have brassily contrived for themselves through the in-your-face jumble of Local Food at Local Food restaurants.

The 150-odd recipes constitute a matching jumble. They are as cheerfully lawless a bunch as I’ve seen in any cookbook.

You will find directions for Chinese-style crystallized ginger and Japanese-style pickled young ginger; Portuguese yeast doughnuts and a baking-powder counterpart from Okinawa; sweet potatoes cooked as tempura or Filipino-style “scones” (actually fritters); a crowd-sized batch of “pan sushi” made with canned tuna; Chinese roast pork and Portuguese vinegared pork; a recipe for poke (Hawaii’s “down-home version of the elegant and restrained sashimi”) using raw fish and another based on raw beef liver; macadamias or the similar candlenuts turned into a chile-laced table condiment or rich sauces accompanying chicken or fish.

And can you actually cook from these formulas? Depends on your idea of cooking “from” a recipe. I produced a voluptuous kau yuk (pork belly steamed with red bean curd and taro, unhelpfully translated as “Red Pot Roast of Pork”) by carefully following Laudan’s directions, a tasty version of chicken with “long rice” (cellophane noodles) by throwing in various flavorings I happened to think of and a delicious adaptation of a Filipino sour fish soup by more or less inventing the proportions as I went along. The thing to grasp is that these are not recipe writers’ recipes.

Here I have to declare a prejudice; I think many cookbooks meant to introduce unfamiliar culinary traditions through recipes tested to a fare-thee-well and abundant, painstaking interpretive detail resemble polite society’s attempts to “sivilize” Huck Finn. Laudan certainly doesn’t err on that side.

I wish she paid more attention to some niceties like providing cross references between recipes or mentioning that “10 shiitake mushrooms” means dried shiitakes. But considering that what she’s trying to conjure up for mainlanders is a series of quite recent, essentially unplanned collisions among the foodways of people who were set down on alien shores to make new lives for themselves and didn’t use cookbooks for the purpose, I would say that her somewhat lackadaisical but non-meddlesome directions fit the bill just right. You could call this a populist cookbook.

The point no one picked up on in the how-Asia-is-changing-American-food debate is that real changes in eating habits are never imposed from above by culinary lawgivers. They happen in staggers and lurches affected but not wholly directed by the course of food technology, and what drives them in the end is not fashion. Somehow people spontaneously learn from each other, even if they don’t always learn what anyone meant to teach.

Laudan notes that Hawaii has furnished various observers with an ideal vantage point from which to study “how multicultural societies develop” or “how new languages are created,” and she suggests that it can do the same for food historians. I suspect that her book may light up some possible futures of American food more penetratingly than a dozen style-chasers’ panels.