Hawaii, Punahou, Malasadas, and Barack Obama
Hawaii has a way of changing the way you think about the world. If you can once penetrate the tourist curtain, it’s one of the most interesting places in the United States, perhaps in the world. It’s a place where diasporas ended up from the Pacific Islands, from Europe and America, from Asia, each of these diasporas made up of several or dozens of totally distinct groups. Stuck out there on the most remote bits of occupied land on earth, the disparate peoples of Hawaii have lived an extraordinary history of accommodation over the last fifty or so years since becoming a state of the United States.
For me the way into this society was by the extraordinary cuisine created there, Local Food, that I described in my book The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage.
When I listen to the speeches and the commentaries that are flying around, I think of the young Obama who surely attended the famous annual carnival of Punahou (pronounced Punahoh), the exclusive private school he attended. There he, like everyone else, must have elbowed his way through the crowds and lined up to get that brown paper bag of sugary, delicious malasadas.
So here’s my description of the Punahou Carnival and its Malasadas. You’ll find a recipe and something about their Okinawan equivalent, andagi.
For more on Obama and Punahou, novelist Allegra Goodman who attended the same school and whose mother was a colleague of mine for many years at the University of Hawaii, writes about how it at once embraced different races and wittingly or not set its students off from those who could not join its ranks. A very interesting place.
