table talk / By Joseph Byrd

Tikis, Traders and Candied Meat

The myth of ‘Polynesian’ cuisine

(Jan. 15, 2009)  When I was a teenager in Tucson in the ’50s, one of the few places to play or hear live jazz was a dive on the south side of town called “The Hula Hut.” It was there I was called to play vibes in a small pickup band backing jazz legend Anita O’Day (the best musician I’d ever met, she was kind to a nervous 17-year old kid. But the really great ones often are).

The Hula Hut’s façade was bamboo, cluttered with flotsam and fishing nets; inside it was lit with torches — well, “torches.” Primitive masks and “tribal” carvings were prominent, and tropical-themed fabrics festooned the booths. Hula girls were languorously draped around the printed menu, which featured exotic rum drinks, sweetened with fruit juices, flavored syrups and liqueurs. Beverages were usually served in equally exotic vessels, each with its garnish of fruit and oversized straw. This was known as a “Tiki Bar.” Remember little paper drink umbrellas? That’s where they come from.

GALLERY >

“Tiki culture” is a relic of the 1940s and ’50s. Los Angeles and Oakland were where it began, Don The Beachcomber and Trader Vic’s each claiming authorship of the concoction called a “Mai-tai”: rums, Curaçao, almond syrup and lime juice, garnished with pineapple and mint.

There was, dating to the early 1930s, a kind of “Hawaiian” cult in pop music, presaged by amateur ukulele players during the Jazz Age. Bing Crosby’s films and records heightened the fad, with movies like Waikiki Wedding and song hits including “Sweet Leilani,” “Blue Hawaii” and “My Little Grass Shack in Kealekekua, Hawaii.” The Hawaiian genre, simple diatonic string band music, enhanced by winds and strings, became a marketable style of ’50s pop, when transliterations of American phrases into Hawaiian pidgin were considered clever: “Mele Kalikimaka” (“Merry Christmas”) was a hit by Crosby and The Andrews Sisters in 1950.

In short, it was a kind of benign racism, cultural nostalgia for a bucolic pre-imperial Hawaii, not so different from the fondness in the ’10s and ’20s for “The Old South,” land of sunny plantations, happy darkies and mint juleps.

There were other manifestations of “Tiki culture” besides tacky music and sugary booze, but it would be years before I discovered them.

All this reminiscence was brought about when I attempted to cull my bulging cookbook library, and came upon Frankly Speaking: Trader Vic’s Own Story. Aha, I said, this can go! But first, I browsed.

“I’ve always loved Mexican food but I could never find a restaurant that could put quality above making a dollar, with the consequence that the food was pretty damned awful. It was greasy, hot, and not well prepared as far as American taste is concerned. Now you have to get this into your fat little head: Mexican food can be greasy and hot — it’s made for Mexicans and that’s the way they like it. Prior to the conquest of Mexico, though, no Mexican food had any fat in it. All the meat was boiled or roasted and it was lean. The Spanish introduced fat into Mexican cooking and the Mexicans adopted it and went overboard with it. And that’s why it’s so greasy.”

1 2 3 NEXT PAGE >SHARE