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Local-Style Teriyaki from Uncle Ken's Corner Table
9/9/08
History Lesson: Why do Japanese who grew up in Hawaii like their foods "sweeter" than the Japanese from Japan? Much of our taste preference for slightly sweet foods stems from the fact that most of the early Japanese Immigrants to Hawaii worked on the Sugar Plantations where pay was low and life was tough. Salt and shoyu had to be imported, and came to Hawaii in ships. You had to buy salt and shoyu. But if you lived on the Sugar Plantation, sugar was "free". All you had to do was to walk down to the sugar mill, and the raw (brown) sugar was piled on the floor in huge mountains inside the warehouses (before being shipped to California for refining into white sugar under the C&H brand (C= California & H= Hawaii). ?You brought your container (usually a metal pot) and scooped up as much sugar as you wanted from that huge pile, and took it home to use in your cooking.
So a lot of early cooking on the Plantations was "sato-shoyu" with lots of sugar. The thick sato-shoyu also "preserved" the food, and retarded spoilage, since there were no refrigerators at the time (and no ice boxes, either). So even today, our recipes in Hawaii are a little sweeter than the same food in Japan whether it's Chicken Sukiyaki (or Hekka, as we call it) or Pork Tofu, Teriyaki, or many other "Japanese" dishes. It's because of our plantation heritage where sugar was plentiful and free. ?I you don't have the Plantation heritage, you probably think our local recipes are ?"too sweet". ?This preference for "sweetness" has been passed down, from generation to generation, as kids copy the recipes of their parents and grandparents who used lots of sugar.
And in the olden days, when the plantation workers went to the store to buy shoyu, the shoyu was not "pre-packed' in bottles or containers. ?You had to bring your own container, and the store clerk would ask you how many "ladles" of shoyu you wanted, e.g., 2 per ladle. And the clerk would dip the ladle into the barrel of shoyu and ladle out the amount that you wanted into your pot. The shoyu came from Japan in large wooden barrels, and the general store would sell the shoyu directly from those barrels. The same with salt or white sugar or flour; you either brought your own container or the clerk would scoop it into a brown paper sack for "dry" items, and sell it by the pound. My grandmother ran a small General Store while my grandfather worked as a Carpenter for Onomea Sugar Plantation on the Big Island. That's how I got all of these anecdotes about life in the old plantation days (during the late 1890's and early 1900's), by listening to them "talk story" around the dinner table as we cooked our chicken hekka.
My grandma once told us that when their neighbor went fishing and caught an Aku (like your namesake), they had to cook, use or preserve the whole fish immediately, since there was no refrigeration. So what they usually did was 1) slice off all of the flesh to serve as Sashimi or to fry with salt & pepper for dinner; 2) use the boney parts to flavor Miso Soup, and 3) use the skin, entrails and head to use as bait to set traps to catch crabs down by the seashore. Sometimes, she would fry the boney parts until the bones got crispy, as a treat for the youngsters. If there were any left over pieces of Fried Aku after dinner, grandma cooked the fried aku in a sugar-shoyu mixture until the sugar-shoyu got nice and thick, coating the fish with the "sato-shoyu". The aku in the sugar-shoyu glaze was kept in a screened cabinet overnight, and the next morning, grandma would reheat the fish, and give it to grandpa as Bento with Musubi and Tsukemono, to take out into the Sugar Cane fields. The sugar-shoyu acted as a preservative so the fish was tasty and safe to eat for lunch the next day, even without refrigeration.
Out in the plantation fields, the workers often shared or exchanged their "okazu" with other workers so that they became familiar with foods of other ethnic workers, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian and Portuguese, sharing food together. So today, Okazu is enjoyed by folks of all ethnicities, and you will often find a mixture of Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, and western foods in a Japanese Okazu-ya. And it all started out on the plantations.
Mahalo and thanks for stopping by,
Uncle Ken
