Maui favorites for a change

When I picked up Still More of Our Favorite Recipes (Maui Extension Homemakers' Council, 1967), I expected it to be a slightly more tropical variation of the 1960s and '70s fundraiser-style regional cookbooks I tend to pick up. It might still primarily feature recipes that dump a bunch of prepackaged ingredients together, shove them in the oven and/or fridge for a few hours, and then be ready to serve everybody at the church potluck. Maybe they'd just feature fresh pineapple instead of canned and macadamia nuts instead of walnuts or pecans.

I wasn't entirely wrong-- the book certainly has some of these recipes, and I'll feature a few in a separate post. I was, however, mostly wrong. This book definitely feels much more distinctive than a lot of my other cookbooks-- certainly in part because I'm completely unfamiliar with a lot of the ingredients that weren't/ aren't common in the midwest, and in part because the recipes seem to rely a lot less on mixes, cans, and boxes than the cookbooks I'm accustomed to.

Yes, there's the familiar ritual of preserving extra fruit by turning it into butters and jams, but the fruits being preserved are not the apples and berries we see in the midwest.

Instead of apples, the cherry-like acerolas get turned into butter and seasoned with ginger.

And I am so unfamiliar with this next fruit that I had to spend a few minutes fruitlessly (ha!) digging through information about rice to find the right poha-- more commonly known as groundcherries or Cape gooseberries.

The book is also interesting because it has so many recipes for cultures that tend not to be heavily represented in my midwestern cookbooks. There are Filipino recipes, like this Bibingca (internet searches suggest Bibingka is a more common spelling)-- a chewy cake made with rice flour and coconut milk.

There are Chinese recipes, like this Lobster with Dau See. 

There's a whole chapter titled "Japanese Special Foods" that features recipes like Ogo Tempura and Zenzai.

I'm sure tempura is a familiar term to most Americans now, but the glossary at the end of the book specifies that Ogo is a type of seaweed for those who might not have known in those pre-internet days when it wasn't easy to just look something up. 

The Zenzai is a sweet bean soup with mochi dumplings.

It's definitely not the chicken and dumplings of midwestern dinner tables that I'm used to seeing.

And of course, there are some traditionally Hawaiian dishes too (apparently-- I'm definitely not the best judge of this!), like Pipi Kaula (which seems to be commonly written as one word now), a variety of jerky.

This book is a refreshing treat. If you're used to midwestern cuisine, there's a lot that's likely to be unfamiliar. If you're interested in Asian/ Pacific Islander recipes from the 1960s, this shows how some families cooked and suggests that they resisted the prepackaged shortcut recipes that were mainstays in a lot of the mainland. And now that a lot of specialty ingredients are available on the internet (and even in bigger grocery stores), midwesterners now would be waaaay more likely to be able to try these than any who got this book as a gift in the late 1960s. I'm just glad to have a little taste of the tropics as the cold weather is setting in for the season.