The water was green-blue off He‘eia Kea Pier, that shade of blue with light sinking through it. I grew up on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, but this was somewhere I’d never been, although it was only a 40-minute drive from my mother’s house. There’s a joke that you can spend your life here and never go to another island, or even to the other side of your own.
I placed my order at the general store, a wooden shack with a pitched shingle roof and a whiteboard menu. The chef Mark Noguchi, Gooch to friends, ran the kitchen. We would bond some years later in our disdain over the accent that mainland newspapers put over the “e” in “poke.” But at the time — this was back in 2011 — I knew him only by reputation: After cooking at one of Hawaii’s most refined and expensive restaurants, he’d gone back to the food of the people and was making farm-to-table plate lunches.
The marquee ingredient, of course, is mayonnaise — an American staple, beloved and scorned in equal measure.
Historians trace the origins of the plate lunch to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when laborers on Hawaii’s pineapple and sugar-cane plantations — first Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese and later Korean and Filipino immigrants — packed rice and meat in kau kau tins for their days in the fields. (Kau kau emerged as pidgin for “eat” and is believed to be an adaptation from the Chinese, possibly the Cantonese caau, or “to fry,” akin to the etymology of the American “chow.”)
The plate lunch of today is still built as pure fuel. It comes with your choice of protein, maybe hamburger steak drinking up gravy, teri (short for teriyaki) beef or guava chicken with its faint memory of Hawaiian Sun juice in a can. Equal weight goes to the carbs: two scoop rice — no “of,” if you please, and drop the “s” at the end of “scoops” while you’re at it — and one scoop mac salad, perfectly domed, like a helping of ice cream. (The traditional utensil for serving is, in fact, the ice-cream scoop.)
I couldn’t tell you which plate I ordered. All I remember is eating that mac salad, very slowly and carefully, in bafflement and wonder. I’d tasted many a mac salad as a kid, and more often than not — sacrilege to my fellow kama‘aina (literally “child of the land” but colloquial for “a local”) — I’d found it a cloying glop.
But here was richness without weight, leavened by tang and salt. It had a little punch-up of Tabasco, and only trace sweetness, like a sidelong glance, from grated carrots and the fleetest grace note of sugar. I stared out at the boats and that green-blue, feeling strangely betrayed. No one told me it could be this good.
Hawaii’s mac salad is not the summer standard of cookouts on the mainland (what we call the rest of the United States). The pasta is cooked past al dente, until swoony and soft all the way through. Some cooks add potatoes, so you get mac salad and potato salad rolled into one; Gooch mixes potatoes and kalo (taro), a …….
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/29/magazine/mac-salad-hawaii-recipe.html