How to Create a Regional Cuisine: The Luau and French Regional Cuisine
You’ve probably seen some of the few photos that have filtered out of the private annual congressional White House picnic that took place last Thursday.
Barack Obama invited Alan Wong from Hawaii to prepare a Hawaiian luau, strewing the White House grounds with straw huts and tiki lamps.
When I saw these photos, a little shiver went up my spine. Almost exactly six months ago, I gave a talk in Hawaii on “How to Create a Regional Cuisine,” sponsored by the admirable Hale Aina Ohana, an organisation dedicated to promoting culinary education.
My two examples were the Hawaiian luau and French Regional Cuisine. And Alan brought his staff along to listen.
I know. It sounds mad. What in the world could the Hawaiian luau have to do with French regional cuisine?
A lot, it turns out. I can’t give all the details here, nor the terrific illustrations, but here’s the outline.
1. Both were created in the 1920s and 30s. Yes, yes, Hawaii had luaus before that but they had almost nothing in common with the tourist luau, and that’s what we are talking about here.
2. Both were designed for tourists
3. Both involved the construction of hotels and other places to stay
4. Both involved new eating utensils, furniture etc. In France regional pottery, tablecloths, furniture; in Hawaii coconut shells, picnic tables, tiki lamps (these come a bit later, but they’re there at the White House).
5. Both involved new costumes. In France quasi medieval costumes for Burgundian wine groups, in Hawaii, the sarong.
6. Both involved new dishes. In France, things like beef bourguinon, in Hawaii things like lomi lomi salmon and mai tais.
7. Both had a massive tourist literature pushing them.
8. Both involved creating a story, a romance actually, for the tourists.
Afterwards Alan and I had a great chat about how that experience (and it went beyond France and Hawaii) almost a hundred years ago might or might not be relevant today.
So there was Alan providing a tourist luau as created in the 1920s and 30s. These are lots of fun. And of course, this one was updated for US politicians by Alan’s inimitable talent in the kitchen.
And I can’t help but wonder what passed through his mind.
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Here’s Alan’s first book. He has another on the way, so watch out for it.
For more on Barack Obama and Alan Wong, see my posts here and here and here and here.
The illustration at the top of this post is a classic in the islands, created for the Matson Company whose steamers brought tourists to Hawaii in the 1920s and 30s.
what about Pizza?
As a regional food? As a relatively late comer? I think the whole question of the creation of Italian food is interesting, fascinating in fact, but I’d need to know a bit more specifically what you are asking.
Sounds very much like what is happening in certain parts of Africa, where Safari tours have become popular. Tourists want ‘authentic’ African food, but not tooo much so!
No liver poke (liver on the point of going off chopped into cubes and seasoned with seaweed) never made it to the luau in Hawaii. Fish poke has become a favorite but the fish is fresh.
I suspect tourism ofen generates/promotes notions of regional cuisines. Will Weaver has done interesting work on Pennsy/Dutch tourism promoted cuisines — an invention there if I recall correctly was the 7 sweets/7 sours, — if not costumes certain kinds of imagery to decorate menus (hex signs) etc. In late 19th century NE we have Colonial Revival/Centennial fever combined with tourism — possibly the invention here was the steamed, molasses sweetened version of brown bread, lots of spinning wheel, Wallace Nutting images of ladies in Colonial dress kneading bread and spinning, etc. Lady Washington teas, etc etc. Lobster rolls may also be attributed, I think, to tourism…
Tourists come looking for the authentic experience, and we’ll dish it up, by gosh.
Rachel and Sandy – I had the very same thought about New England cookery. But why stop there? Tex-Mex, “authentic” Southern. Regional Italian. Thai. SO much of what we think of as cuisine is invented or recast for tourists. Or exported. And if it weren’t, we probably wouldn’t know about it, right?
People create monuments out of their foods so that the visitors will want to ‘know it’. Consider travel. When you ask people why they are going to any given place, it usually involves seeing (so as to be able to say they saw) the monuments. There’s a shared experience in monuments. That the monuments don’t exactly reflect the reality of the culture doesn’t matter a whole lot to anyone on either side. The created monuments are designed to be easy to sell. Reality is often something people don’t want to buy a whole lot of. :)
I do have to wonder how much the White House Director of Protocol got involved in the experience you described above, Rachel. There are often more hands than just the chefs involved in the planning of this sort of thing.
Dutifully off to eat her NYC monuments of hot dogs with lots of onion relish and bagels with sable,
K
Rachel, How do you arrive at the argument that French Regional Cuisine was created in the 1920s and 1930s? This is almost certainly not the case unless you have a particular definition of Regional Cuisine that you don’t include in your list.
I’m not sure why some people misread marketing materials and tourist brochures as food history or culture to the extent they seem to. Well, I suppose quite a bit of is framed that way…
But having traveled to places that do not market regional cuisine, I rather appreciate places I’ve been that do. It makes eating out easier without having local fixers or access to affluent homes.
Eating in South Korea outside of Seoul (or affluent households) used to be pretty dismal before domestic tourism was cultivated to a growing and now solidly established middle class.
I’ve been France often enough to know that I really don’t want to visit another penny pinching rural household where food is parsimoniously doled out. The one store and one restaurant in the village closes at 5 pm. And the farmers market is open just once a week and in the winter it’s root vegetables galore!
I get emails often from this or that journalist who wants to visit Algeria. Can I recommend restaurants that highlight the best of regional cuisine? Um, yeah…
This is all very dull stuff. People want to hear about French chef food at home, affluent French foodie friends, aristocratic Korean cooking, Berber women hand rolling couscous with big smiles on their faces, North African feasts, etc…
Hi Ji-Young, I get the same question about the part of Mexico in which I live. We don’t want generic Mexican food, we want the best of regional cuisine. My mouth used to drop, now I am getting answers. I’m really behind with posting but will try to get to this one.
Seriously. I wish there were a fixer who would take on the job of creating a regional cuisine for the college town I live in then somehow teach the people who want to sell it to cook it and cook it consistently well.
Well, Karen, you have my handy dandy 8 point guide. A few more log cabin lodges like those in Shenadoah, country ham and ramps with local artisanal bread of ancient vintage, organic moonshine cured with local fruits, hand thrown pottery from (say) Berea or a few students in the art dept at Virginia Tech, a bribe to the food critics of national newspapers, oh, and some costumes.
I’m with Karen! There’s a huge, I mean HUGE, potential here for someone to do just that. Even if they picked the regional cuisine of someplace else, that would be a start! The menus of most places here are so unimaginative it boggles the mind.
I’ve been cleaning out reams of files, old xeroxed articles, and stuff, packing, and some of the material I’ve collected basically supports the point you’re making, Rachel. But you know, we have so few real feast days anymore, that restaurant food and other foods (like the ones created for tourists) offer perhaps a respite from the daily and the dull.
Hope the move is going well. There used to be one good restaurant in town when we were there, the Hunan in the little (now old, then new) shopping mall. Hunan-Appalachian?
First, I have to say that I’d never imagined a comparison of French Regional cooking and The Hawaiian luau. They both have food!
I believe that there is true regional cuisine in the Guanajuato, México area, but it thrives in part because of tourism. Por ejemplo, Restaurante de La Sierra (where we did not eat) and to a lesser extent, La Cabaña de Lolita, where we did have comida.
But, I’ll admit, one visit does not make a conclusion.
Saludos,
Mike
This is not just to shock, Michael, though it is true that I wanted students in Hawaii to realize that they were not entirely out of the culinary mainstream.
But the forces creating the luau and French provincial cuisine were the same–steamships in the first case, automobiles in the second, aided by nationalism etc. Sure the foods were different but the root causes were the same.
I have to write a long reply about the regional cuisine of Guanajuato.
Another thing I find interesting is how ideas of regional cuisines become internalized as part of general cultural identity.
Back in the good old days of landowners and poor peasants what percentage of any given local population actually enjoyed a range of local ingredients and had the means and staff required to prepare them on a regular basis?
You know my answer. The priest, the doctor, the man who’d made money in the city and bought country property.
Everybody ought to take a look at Igor Cusack’s work on cooking, cookbooks, and national identity in Africa.
I agree, it’s interesting. I’d put this in a slightly different category because I think the mechanisms for creating regional cuisines within a nation and creating national cuisines are a tad different.
I am echoing here but this has happened with the food of African-Americans for different reasons and with questionable results. The creation of the concept of Soul Food in the 1970s as an attempt at cultural validation for the Black community led to a surge of pride in something that was special and delicious that black folks could call their own. Slowly and very surely, blacks came to be identified with that sort of food -fried chicken, candied sweet potatoes, chitterlings, etc.- that while delicious aren’t the healthiest and were never something that they ate on a regular basis. Now, most black people themselves don’t know that there is more to the food than those heavy, fatty, things and everyone outside the group assumes that’s all black people eat. A few results of this: rampant diabetes, high blood pressure, etc. Not simplifying here because there are certainly other factors, but to a large degree this is certainly similar to the phenomenon that you describe but in this case it was to create cultural/culinary pride that became popular with the masses and has since had a detrimental effect (to a degree) on the owners of those cultural and culinary traditions.
It’s complicated isn’t it? I think of what people like Sid Mintz (or come to that Elizabeth David) said about English Cuisine.
Perhaps, Ji-Young – in any given culture where there does exist some formalized ‘regional’ cooking theme there is not only the ‘high’ cooking and the ‘low’ cooking which are different but also the ‘them’ cooking as opposed to the ‘us’ cooking which the two previous categories would include.
Certainly us-them. The kind of luau Obama or his head of protocol put on at the White House is anathema to anyone living in Hawaii, especially native Hawaiians.
I think it would baffle most people alive today, be completely beyond their ken or their imagination, to realize how truly limited and boring are the number of regional/local ingredients available on a daily basis. In most parts of the world the quantity of ingredients was also very limited. So, it must take a lot of invention and ingenuity to create a regional cuisine salable to visitors who are accustomed to a large range of ingredients and styles.
Another point for lack of access to local food early in the tourist cycle is that local people don’t ‘eat out’ much until later in the cycle. Some years ago I spent time in several occasions in Ulan Bator and after a while I asked someone about the lack of Mongolian restaurants. There were Korean and Italian and some other foreign style restaurants but none advertising Mongolian cooking. The person looked puzzled and asked why anyone would go to a restaurant to eat the same food they could eat at home cheeper. I mentioned Mongolian Barbeque with the large hot griddle and got a laugh with the explanation, “Oh, the Chinese invented that!” I never saw a single meal of that type any where in the country and deduced that the great antipathy to the Chinese was part of the reason it was not used even though tourists were beginning to come and were asking for it. I suspect that these many years into the cycle that style of cooking is probably now available and advertised as regional Mongolian fare. I hasten to add that I don’t put this out as valid historical research, just personal observation.
A restaurant culture is a very funny thing, very rare in human history. You don’t, in general, want to eat food in a kitchen you can’t see in the company of people you can’t choose. Hence it’s link to tourism. Well there’s a longer story.
Another thing I find interesting is how much the idea of “French regional cuisine” is used as a sort of meta-template for discussing and creating “regional” cuisines elsewhere.
A really important point.