Bread, Celestial Made. Or Bread’s Long Journey to Hawaii

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to post for some time.  This ad appeared in Honolulu in a weekly, The Polynesian, in June 1840.  If it’s hard to read the words, here they are:

Good people all, walk in and buy

Of Sam & Mow, good cake & pie:

bread hard or soft, for land or sea,

“Celestial” made; come buy of we.

Now if this ad had appeared in 1880, when the Chinese (Celestials as immigrants were called in the nineteenth century) from Canton began arriving in the Hawaiian Islands in force, when bread making and European foods in general were making inroads across East Asia, it would not be so surprising.  But 1840!  That’s really early.

Bakeries are pretty tricky things, after all, demanding a good bit of equipment and skill.  You have to be able to build an oven and (if you are to bake pies and cakes) have to have various molds and forms.  You have to have some kind of leavening.  Hard to believe there were lots of yeasts floating around in these remote islands just waiting to be capture, but perhaps some microbiologist can correct me.  And few of the plants there (unlike say the maguey that produced pulque that could raise bread in Mexico) would have been suitable.  So probably some kind of sour dough starter.  Or perhaps (see below) some kind of chemical raising agent.

And of course you needed flour.  Don Marin, a Mexican from California (which was of course Mexican then) had tried sowing wheat in the second decade of the nineteenth century, apparently to no avail.

No, in the early nineteenth century flour was shipped round the Cape from the East Coast of the United States. “On opening a barrel stamped ‘Flour’ *said J.S. Green in the Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society in 1852( a chisel and mallet were always put in requisition to prepare the way for sifting, and these even were so ineffectual oftentimes that a pick axe or crow-bar seemed necessary for the work” of breaking up the solid cake.  Usually it was musty and sometimes sour, and often riddled with bugs and worms.  “In those days the demand for saleratus (a naturally occurring sodium or postassium bicarbonate, also imported) was imperious” to alleviate the indigestibility of the flour.

Into this world of weevil-ridden compacted flour come Sam and Mow from Canton, even advertising themselves as being from Canton, as if that had some connection with bakery.  Is that even possible?  Canton, after all, is in the rice-eating south of China.  If they ate wheat products, it was most likely noodles of various kinds.

Even so, a story begins to form in my head. The British in particular had been trading in Canton, porcelain and then opium, for well over a hundred years.  This indeed was the time of the Opium Wars and the attempt to open China to European influence.

Is it possible that the key to this story lies in the third line, “bread hard or soft, for land or sea?”  Ships sailing into Canton would have been running low on ship’s biscuit it may be assumed.  It would have made sense for entrepreneurial Chinese (who had perhaps sailed on British ships and observed bakeries in other parts of the world) to supply this need by setting up bakeries in Canton.  And perhaps the few British residents there, missionaries and merchants, provided the link to the soft bread, the pies and cakes.

And by 1840, there had been links between Canton and Hawaii for over half a century.  There had been Cantonese sailors with Captain Cook when he arrived in the islands in 1778 and others had come in the intervening years on the merchant ships that commonly had a few Chinese sailors, some of whom stayed. Apart from bakeries, they set up rice farms, sugar mills, stores, restaurants, and sold wine and liquor.

And then there’s one last factor to consider.  The market.  Who in Honolulu is 1840 is going to be buying bread?  The population of the islands is overwhelmingly Hawaiian, perhaps 80,000 or so, sadly down due to disease, but still the majority.  Their food was taro, perhaps just beginning to shift to rice.  There are about four hundred foreigners, thirty or forty of them Chinese.   So say 350 Europeans and Americans (including missionaries who arrived in the 1820s) who were most of the other foreigners. Enough just to support a bakery.  But dicey, I would think.

Ah ha. The ocean again.  In the 1820s whalers from New England started wintering in the Islands.  They would have wanted pies and cakes and soft bread.  And hard bread for going to sea again, for the long haul north back to the Arctic or southward home round the Cape. Now there’s a market for Sam and Mow.

One last question.  What is the green sprig that the Celestial is holding?  Tea?  Any thoughts?

I don’t have conclusive evidence of any of this but that is the story I tell myself.  But what a way for bread to come to Hawaii.

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