“Difficulty between the United States and Great Britain about Wild Pigs.”

How can anyone not love a title like that? It’s from the New York Times, May 23, 1854, p. 4. The story explains that American whalemen had killed a few wild pigs on one of the Falkland Islands and that England and America were at a diplomatic breaking point over the incident.

This from a nice blog post over at The Historical Society by Heather Cox Richardson.  It’s framed as a plea for maritime history but it’s equally relevant to food history.  She continues.

The crisis over the pigs illuminates an ongoing contest between the claims of landholders and fishermen to resources, a contest that stretched throughout the nineteenth century and that was key both to the construction of nations and to their interactions with other countries.

If you’ve ever wondered how all those eighteenth and nineteenth century navigators and whalers were able to keep going in the deep oceans, particularly the south Atlantic and the Pacific, one of the keys is that they took with them European domestic animals, dropping them off whenever they made landfall.  Here’s my description in The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage of the process.  Pigs had been brought to Hawaii centuries before by the orginal settlers. Cattle, horses, sheep and goats had not.

Taking a steer ( Hereford not longhorn) out to ship to be sent to Honolulu for slaughter, 1930. Courtesy Hawaii State Archives

In 1793, Captain George Vancouver sailed H.M.S Discovery into Kawaihae harbor on the Big Island and altered forever the diet of the Hawaiians, for with him he brought six cows, a bull, four ewes, and two rams. It was a tense time. Just 14 years earlier, Vancouver had been with Captain Cook when he was clubbed to death under the cliffs at Kealakekua Bay a few miles to the south. . .

The animals were in sorry shape, having had little water for days and no green forage for weeks as the little vessel plowed its way across the vast Pacific Ocean.   . . . Kamehameha [the chief who using British firearms had captured all the islands except Kauai] oversaw landing the animals. Vanouver’s account does not elaborate, but hoisting cattle, ewes and rams, even in weakened condition, into canoes lined with paddlers must have been quite a game.  The cattle, after all, were longhorns.

Vancouver made Kamehameha promise that the animals woud be taboo (except for the king’s table) for a decade so that they could multiply. He made him promise that women as well as men would then be able to eat the meat as long as it was not from the same animal (a big concession as women were subject to a fierce set of taboos and most appealing food was off limits).

The animals multiplied.

Mexican cowboys (paniolos from espanoles) and their horses  were imported to manage them from California, then still part of Mexico. Native Hawaiians also became fine cowboys.  Hawaiian cowboys compete on equal or more than equal terms with mainland cowboys in rodeos.

On horseback in front of Hawaii's Iolani Palace, 1980s. Rachel Laudan

Whalers over-wintered in the islands. Beef appealed more than fish and taro.

The biggest cattle ranch in the US in the twentieth century was on the Big Island of Hawaii, founded by one of those  New England whalers, John Parker Palmer, who jumped ship in the islands in 1809 at the age of 19.

Winching steer into ship to be sent to Honolulu for slaughter, 1930s. Courtesy Hawaii State Archives

Hawaiians became aficionados of cecina (jerky), called pipikaula (pipi apparently their pronunciation of beef). Chinese and Japanese indentured laborers who stayed in the islands became enthusiastic beef eaters, enjoying Chinese oxtail soup and Japanese sukiyaki (and I believe in the latter case encouraging its popularity in Japan via back migration).

In short, I concur with Heather Cox Richardson about the importance of maritime history.  And there’s always a food story to accompany it.

The breadfruit is a remarkable food: The prickly football-size pod is full of nutrients and energy. Growing on one of the earth’s highest-yielding trees, it could even help alleviate world hunger, backers believe.

There’s just one problem: It tastes remarkably bland.

Julia Flynn Siler’s article on breadfruit, or more specifically on the Inaugural Breadfruit Festival on the Big Island of Hawaii, in the Wall Street Journal provoked a torrent of comments, most of them outraged at her dismissal of this foodstuff. Worth skimming through them.

On the same day, Julia Flynn Siler published a much more sympathetic account of the festival in her blog.  And besides being the author of the forthcoming Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure, she has written several nice blog posts on food in Hawaii, including one on kava.  My goodness, I never managed to track down kava when I was there, but then the islands are changing fast.

So who knows what happened with the WSJ article. It came across as a series of cheap shots. Such a missed opportunity to offer readers a way in to an important food that is mainly associated with a mythic Pacific bounty.

A point worth making, though, is that Hawaii is not really the place to look for delicious breadfruit recipes.  Sure, the original settlers brought the tree with them.  It grows all over the islands.  The Wikipedia picture turns out to be of one of my favorites, the one in Foster Botanic Gardens, where I idled away many happy hours when I lived in Hawaii.

Breadfruit Tree in Foster Botanic Gardens, Honolulu, Hawaii.

And sure, you can buy slices in Farmer’s Markets and in Chinatown.  But in ten years in Hawaii I never saw it on a menu, nor was I ever offered it by anyone. In Wanda Adams’ two volume collection of 150 years´worth of recipes from the Honolulu Advertiser, The Island Plate, there is not a single recipe for breadfruit.

The Hawaiians, unlike say the Marquesans, did not make much use of breadfruit.  They preferred their poi made of taro and if that failed or in dry areas, of sweet potato.

Nor did any of the subsequent immigrants change this.  Their favorite staple was rice.  Hawaii has been a rice-eating society for a hundred years, though the recent influx of mainland immigrants may be changing that.

Three cheers that there are initiatives to promote breadfruit in Hawaii. Three cheers that cooks in Hawaii are trying to find new ways of preparing it. This, however, means a high failure to success ratio.

Very few plants are intrinsically delicious.  They take breeding, processing, and cooking to become delicious.  If you want established delicious breadfruit dishes, then go to the South Pacific, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia or South India where cooks have been long been serious about breadfruit.

____________

Here’s Rosa Maria Gonzalez Lamas (in Spanish) on breadfruit (pana) in Puerto Rico.

¿Te gustan los tostones de pana? ¿El flan de pana? ¿La pana con aguacate y serenata de bacalao? ¿El mofongo de pana? ¿Los chips de pana? ¿La pana en escabeche?

Here’s a recipe from Kerala in India from Ammini Ramachandran’s Grains, Greens, and Grated Coconuts.

2 firm green breadfruit

1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder

Salt to taste

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

12 to 15 fresh curry leaves

Peel the thick green skin and cut the breadfruit in half. Cut the segments into half-inch cubes. Place the cubes in a heavy saucepan, pour in enough water to cover, and stir in the turmeric and salt. Cook over medium heat until the vegetable is tender and all the water has evaporated. Stir periodically so that they breadfruit does not stick to the saucepan. Heat the oil in a heavy, large skillet, and fry the curry leaves. Transfer the cooked vegetables to the skillet, and pan-fry over low heat for twelve to fifteen minutes, stirring occasionally. Serve warm with rice and curries.

In Hawaii, the question of native Hawaiian heritage has expanded from maintaining taro cultivation, the big topic in the 90s, to include hand pounding taro to make poi.  To all of you out there who suspect that a purple puree can’t be any good, my experiments pounding taro convinced me it is delicious.

This long article by Catherine Mariko Black on taro and poi debates in the Honolulu Weekly puts the emphasis on legalizing hand pounded poi (something that will surely happen given the politics of the islands). To me the problem now, as then, is how to make it economically viable. It’s something the activists are concerned about too.

Practitioners like Anthony maintain that the starchier taro they need to make pai ‘ai [here meaning hand pounded taro] is different from the taro poi millers usually use and is sometimes more labor intensive for the farmer to grow. That’s why he and others have begun to pay double, or even triple, taro’s going price of about 60 cents a pound. It’s also why he can sell his hand-pounded pai ‘ai for $10 to $15 a pound, two to three times more than conventional poi.

Anthony puts great emphasis on the economic health behind this issue.

“My number one question to the kupuna has always been, ‘What do we need most in Hawaii?’ And they all say we need more taro farmers. So I looked at the numbers and at the current farm gate price for taro, which is what the poi mills are paying. I’d have to grow 100,000 pounds of taro to make $60,000 a year. But if I sustainably farm and pound my own taro, I can make $70,000 by selling just 7,000 pounds per year, and all I need is one acre. So the real question is, if we want more taro farmers, we need to figure out how they’re going to make enough money to feed their families.” (My emphasis).

Now I entirely agree that it is important to attend to the economics of any kind of farming.  But this is fairly astonishing.

Here’s a quote from a piece I wrote earlier on poi.

The cost of poi in Hawaii is soaring.  Compare these prices

20 lbs rice go for $8.oo-10.00

3.5 pound bag of poi at Costco $15.00

3oz powdered poi including shipping to mainland $22.00 (with water this makes 13.5 oz poi)

Now you do add water to the plastic bags of poi so that the eating weight goes up but not as much as the weight of rice when cooked.

Bottom line: poi is about 8 times as expensive as rice.  Ergo.  Hawaiians eat rice except on special occasions.

That means that if Anthony can sell his product for $10 to $15 a pound, it makes poi twenty four times as expensive as rice.

If I remember correctly, when Hawaiians subsisted on poi with a few seasonings such as fish or limu (seaweed), they needed 4 to 5 lbs a day (which would be about right because if you subsist on bread which is much drier and hence lighter you need about 2 lbs a day).  That would be $40 to $60 a day for your basic foodstuff or $18,000 a year.

Or, looked at another way, Anthony is reckoning on making about $70,000 a year from one acre.    Of course, I assume he is not counting as one of his costs the price of land which in Hawaii runs from $15,000 an acre (presumably this is dry leeward land no good for taro) to $500,000 an acre.  Presumably he can get land set aside for Native Hawaiians.  If I am calculating right, that means a return of somewhere between 300% and 14%.

Here, for comparison is a quote on returns in South Dakota (simply because it was the first I ran across).

The net rate of return is a return to agricultural land ownership after deducting property taxes and other land ownership expenses. Appraisers refer to the current annual net rate of returns as the market- derived capitalization rate. Average net rates of return for 2010 varied from 3.9% for non-irrigated cropland to 3.6% for hayland and 2.7% for rangeland, and averaged 3.2% for all-agricultural land. This is the fifth consecutive year that average net rates of return were below 4.0% for all- agricultural land, compared to an average of 5.4% during the 1990s and 4.4% from 2000 to 2005. The practical range of net rates of return to land for 2010 reported by respondents varies from 2.0% to 7.0% for cropland, from 1.0% to 6.5% for hayland, and 1.0% to 5.0% for rangeland. The median net rate of return was 3.5% for cropland and 3.0% for hayland and rangeland.

It would not be the first time that what was once a staple becomes a luxury. Maintaining culinary heritage comes at a price.  Not a bad thing.  It reminds us of the huge cost of land and, before farming and processing was mechanized, of human time.  But it does mean that poi will be a luxury not a staple.

Again thanks to Robyn Eckhardt of Eating Asia for the link.

In 2010, Malaysia kicked off Malaysian Kitchen for the World —a robust gastrodiplomacy campaign meant to create awareness about Malaysia as it creates awareness for Malaysian cuisine and recipes. The campaign has been carried out by the Malaysia External Trade Development Corporation (MATRADE) to promote Malaysian cuisine globally, with heavy emphasis on the U.S. and U.K.

The brilliance of Malaysia’s campaign is that it has also combined aspects of cultural diplomacy with its culinary outreach. In this regard, Malaysia has set up night markets in famous landmarks of cosmopolitan cities such as a Malaysian night market in the middle of London’s Trafalgar Square. More recently, this public diplomacy campaign touched both coasts of the United States as it set up a night market on Santa Monica’s bustling 3rst Street Promenade and in the hip Meatpacking District in New York City. Such cultural and culinary diplomacy is most effective, as it plays on all the senses, not just taste.

Hat tip for both of these to Robyn Eckhardt, of Eating Asia, a must read for anyone interested in the traditional culinary scene of Southeast Asia and China.

For me, this was summed up by an encounter at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, one of my favorite events. But like all events, the attendees are a mixed bunch.  And when one of them years ago, on learning that I lived in Hawaii as we chatted over lunch, let out “Oh you poor dear.  There’s no food there.  There’s no peasant background.  Nothing culinary of interest I’m afraid,”  I could feel my hackles rising, my bristles going on alert.

I thought about explaining about the extraordinary mix of people in the islands, about the culinary ferment, about the creation of a grass roots Local Cuisine.  Then I thought better of it.  My companion across the lunch table was wedded to one of the great myths of our time, or better clusters of myths:  that cuisines have their origins in peasant societies; that cuisines are rooted in the local environment; that cuisines are immobile and that the older and deeper their roots, the more respect they deserve. Shattering that set of assumptions was more than I could do in a noisy lunch setting.

Hawaii–a place where the cuisine was created by diasporas, by migrants–had one of the most vibrant food cultures I had ever encountered as cooks in the home and in restaurants found ingredients, utensils, condiments, and above all techniques with which they could experiment to their hearts’ content.

This culinary ferment paralleled the intellectual, economic, cultural and technological ferment that so often results when different peoples come in contact.  When Greek geometry meets Babylonian measurement. When ceramics soar thanks to interchanges between Persia and China, and then between Europe and the Americas.  When Europeans rediscover and rework the philosophy and science of the Ancient World.  And so on.  It’s not invariable but it is very common.

So that’s why I blink a bit at the two proposals that Mexico has submitted to UNESCO to make all or some of the indigenous cuisine of Mexico a patrimony of humanity (and a source of tourist revenue).  The first in 2005 was entitled Pueblo de maíz. La cocina ancestral de México. Ritos, ceremonias y prácticas culturales de la cocina de los mexicanos  (The people of maize.  The ancestral cuisine of Mexico. Rites, ceremonies and cultural practices of the cooking of Mexicans).  The second, under consideration right now, narrows the focus to the cuisine of certain rural settlements in the state of Michoacán in central Mexico.

Mexico is a country that is at least 70% urban.  It was created as a nation in the early nineteenth century when it included huge chunks of what is now the United States. Before that it was part of the Spanish Empire in the Americas, an empire that I needn’t remind you stretched all the way south to present day Argentina and that put its stamp on the cooking of that entire territory. Before that what is now Mexico was in the hands of various peoples, again whose territory did not map on to present day boundaries (and who were not always maize eaters). And to cap it all off, Mexico, like most of the world’s nations, has had a stream of immigrants–Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, American, Chinese, Japanese, Lebanese, South and Central Americans, to name just some–who have contributed to the country’s cuisine.

That extraordinarily rich past, that mixing of peoples, the creative fusions that have resulted never appears in the UNESCO proposals, proposals that assert that Mexican identity and a cuisine that purportedly reaches back 8000 years is one and the same.  Defining Mexican identity this way leaves most of the population with the choice of opting for a past that is not theirs or for being left out of the official national identity.  Primogeniture wins again.  The present powers pick on the first occupants as the genuine ones (setting to one side the actual history of the indigenous in Mexico).

Can you imagine the US defining its national cuisine as that of the native Americans?  Even the New Englanders, who had a go at defining it as their cuisine in the late nineteenth century, couldn’t get away with that.  Can you imagine most other Latin American countries defining their national cuisines as ones that including no Spanish colonial let alone later migrant influence?  I don’t think so.

Next week I will be talking on culinary heritage in Panama City, a city that like Honolulu has been the beneficiary of global migration.  And I will be taking the opposite tack from the UNESCO proposals, arguing that it is this very synthesis that has created their rich and fascinating cuisine.

Finally a couple of links for those who read Spanish.

An analysis and critique of the first Mexico UNESCO proposal by Albert Moncusí and Beatríz Santamarina can be found in  an anthology Identidades en el plato: El patrimonio cultural alimentario entre Europa y América edited by Marcelo Alvarez  (President of the College of Argentinian Anthropologists and on the International Commission on the Anthropology of Food) and Xavier Medina (Barcelona, President of the European branch of the International Commission on the Anthropology of Food).  Thanks to Luis Vargas of the Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicos of the UNAM for the link.

Taking the opposite tack, a Course on culinary tourism given that the Universidad del Claustro Sor Juana can be Programación curso Gerardo.

First, from someone very important in my life, Wanda Adams who has worked for the Honolulu Advertiser most of her adult life. I’ve written about Wanda Adams and her work on this blog.  Do take a look because she’s very special (and great on Hawaii, too).

The Advertiser is changing hands June 6. I have not received an offer from
the new entity and do not expect to as time is short.

I am interested in freelance, part-time or project-related work or the right
full-time job.

I can research, write, edit, manage projects, brainstorm, plan, do some
rudimentary food styling, shoot rudimentary food photos and say “Do you want
fries with that.”

If you hear of anything, please alert me or pass my info on to the person in
question.

It has been nearly 40 years of delight and you were all part of it.

Mahalo piha and obrigado.

Wanda A.

If you have any leads, and with internet they don’t have to be in Hawaii, please respond directly to Wanda at wandaadams@clearwire.net or idasylva@aol.com

Second, one about Guanajuato

My name is Anthony. I am trying to find some info on my genealogy. My dad does not know much except that my Grandfather comes from a farming village in the State of Guanajuato. My grandfather come from a village in the mountains of Guanajuato called ” Magdaleno”. I was wondering if you have ever heard of that village and does it still exist or is it called something else. I tried emailing the University of Guanajuato and got no response. I would really like to find out about my mexican heritage. Would you be able to help me. Or do you know who I can contact to possible find out some info. My grandfather’s name was ” Magdaleno Juarez” He was from a small farming village of ” Magdaleno Mexico. He crossed into United States illegally I think back in 1924? He rode on the Railroad to cross United States border. Thank you for your time in reading this. I hope you can help me. Thanks and best regards Anthony Whatton………

Please reply directly to anthonyandtracy@msn.com

And third, Guanajuato again.

Hello – I am an MBA student doing research on access to safe drinking water in poor barrios in Leon or other Guanajuato cities.

I found your blog very useful for an overall history on Guanajuato.  Do you have connections with people, organizations, or businesses who may have information to help me?  My goal is to learn about the current access in order to develop a business plan that would create a microfranchise that sells affordable drinking water to low income populations in Guanajuato.

Anything you can offer will be much appreciated, thanks!

Faith

Believe it or not, I could not think of just the right person.  Any Guanajuato readers who can, please write to Faith directly at

faith.garlington@okstate.edu

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.

Admittedly Hawaii had special problems as well as special advantages.  The advantages included rich volcanic soil and a huge range of growing conditions.  The problems included lack of water on the leeward sides of the island. More important yet, the costs of transporting agricultural products over the vast distances that separate the islands from the nearest large populations and of having products that could even survive the journey made farming in the islands a risky venture.

Chat about tropical bounty was thus enough to make farmers grit their teeth.  When I was there in the 1990s, the fate of the papaya growers was a big issue.  Papaya was a fruit that grew readily in the islands and that found an export market, especially with the little solo papaya that had been developed that was small enough for one or two servings.  The papayas were being attacked by a virus however.

A scientist at the University of Hawaii, Hilo came to the rescue with a genetically-modified variety.  Here’s the story from one of my favorite bloggers, Matt Kinase, the Scientist-Gardener.

In Hawaii, the Hawaiians had traditionally had many, many varieties.  For a splendid site by John Cho that celebrates some ornamental varieties bred in Hawaii using cultivars from elsewhere, check out this.  And for his Facebook page dedicated to taro, go here.

And while you are at it, don’t miss some of his other gems. Early photos of taro from the Hawaii State Archives; photos that illustrate how rice displaced taro in late nineteenth century Hawaii.  And lots of great links.

(Thanks to Luigi of Agricultural Biodiversity for his post that alerted me to John Cho’s work)