A Luau Thanksgiving
In the November dusk, a motley procession of cars pulled away from our school in the Tenderloin, headed out from San Francisco to a cliff-top back yard some 30 miles away, overlooking San Pablo Bay. Some of the cars were filled with food and beer, others sagged under loads of firewood and stones, still others were stuffed with burlap bags, chicken wire, and bales of banana, taro, and ti leaves. Proudly leading the parade was a decrepit little blue Honda Civic that contained two burly guys and – lolling on the back seat – a very recently dead, disconcertingly intact 150-lb. pig.
Even without the pig, the members of our class at the California Culinary Academy were a pretty diverse crew. From Tokyo to Tucson to Texas, from Manila to Maine, some were fresh from high school, others were changing from careers as truck drivers, stockbrokers, dancers, and technical writers. Seemingly, we hadn’t much in common except that we loved cooking and wanted to make our living doing it. We’d worked long and hard together for more than a year and bonded in ways we’d never thought possible. Now we were ready to celebrate. It was Thanksgiving and we were gonna have a luau.
On Thanksgiving Day, most of us had jobs preparing meals for other people, so we couldn’t begin our own feast till Friday. Only about two-thirds of us had grown up with the Thanksgiving tradition, anyway. Our cohorts from Japan, Philippines, Hawaii, and Fiji liked the idea, but somehow turkey and cranberry sauce never entered the discussion. It just evolved that the fusion food of the Pacific represented our collective idea of a gustatory celebration.
Since the beginning of its human occupation, Pacific history is one long story of peripatetic voyaging and settling, warfare and colonization, cultures colliding and morphing. Beginning with Polynesians in sailing canoes seeking landfall across vast distances of ocean, it continued with seafaring Europeans, Americans, and Asians engaged in trade, agriculture, and religion. Over the centuries, all of these cultural migrations contributed to the island culinary traditions.
A cooking device found throughout the Pacific is the earth oven (imu in Hawaii, lovo in Fiji, umu in Samoa), where food is very slowly cooked in a pit, heated by hot stones, and smothered with aromatic leaves and dirt. Expertly led by our Fijian classmate and his Hawaiian wife, we spent a long, wild, chilly night digging a pit, building a bonfire to heat the rocks, and finally burying our pig in a shroud of hot stones, burlap, and leaves. Fortified by the usual substances and a boom box, we intermittently partied and dozed until the next afternoon, as we waited for the pig to cook and our feast to begin.
And feast we did, not only on the succulent, smoky, fork-tender kalua pig, but on lavender poi, yams and pineapple, marinated fish poke, and coconut haupia. There was lumpia from the Philippines, long rice and long beans from China, sushi from Japan, Portuguese sweet bread, and Texas-style pecan pies.
Looking back, it seems fitting that we chose Island food for our Thanksgiving party. We’d come together, bringing our respective home cooking from Asia, the Islands, and all over the States. At school, we’d taught one another and learned to work together to produce some great food. So, before we graduated and scattered to our various corners of the planet, how appropriate that we’d celebrated our diversity and fusion by cooking and eating the crossroads food of the Pacific islands.
This article appears in December 24 • 2004.
