The water was teal at He’eia Kea Pier, that shade of blue through which the light was sinking. I grew up on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, but this was one place I’d never been, even though it was only a 40-minute drive from my mom’s house. There is 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 store, a wooden cabin with a pitched shingle roof and a whiteboard menu. The chef Mark Noguchi, Gooch to friends, ran the kitchen. Several years later, we would bond with our disdain for the mainland newspapers’ emphasis on the “e” in “por”. But at the time—this was in 2011—I only knew him by reputation: After cooking at one of Hawaii’s most sophisticated and expensive restaurants, he’d gone back to making the people’s food, making farm-to-table plate. having lunch.
The marquee ingredient, of course, is mayonnaise — an American staple, loved and scorned in equal measure.
Historians trace the origins of the plate lunch to the late 1800s and early 1900s, when workers on Hawaii’s pineapple and sugar cane plantations—first Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese, and later Korean and Filipino immigrants—produced rice and packed meat in ku ku glances for their days on the field. †kau kau emerged as pidgin for “food” and is believed to be an adaptation of the Chinese, possibly the Cantonese caauor ‘bake’, akin to the etymology of the American ‘chow’.)
Today’s plate lunch is still built as pure fuel. It comes with your choice of protein, perhaps hamburger steak drinking gravy, teri (short for teriyaki) beef, or guava chicken with its vague memory of Hawaiian Sun juice in a can. Equal weight goes to the carbs: two scoops of rice — no “van,” if you like, and drop the “s” at the end of “scoop” while you’re at it — and a scoop of mac salad, perfectly domed, like a portion of ice cream. (The traditional utensil for serving is actually 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 bewilderment 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 country” but colloquially for “a local”) — I thought it was a bland glop.
But here was wealth without weight, leavened with acid and salt. It had a little punch-up from Tabasco, and just a trace of sweetness, like a side look, of grated carrots and the most fleeting graceful note of sugar. Staring at the boats and that teal, I felt strangely betrayed. No one told me it could be this good.
Hawaii’s mac salad isn’t the summer staple of mainland cookouts (what we call the rest of the United States). The pasta is cooked al dente, until swooning and tender. Some cooks add potatoes so you get mac salad and potato salad in one; Gooch mixes potatoes and kalo (taro), a nutty root vegetable that is almost fleshy, with dense, custardy flesh.
The marquee ingredient, of course, is mayonnaise — an American staple, loved and scorned in equal measure. Too much fat, the doctors scolded. Too low, sniff the hedonists (unless you make it yourself). “Just so you know, you’ll be using a lot of mayonnaise,” Gooch warns. “Obscene, guaranteed-to-make-your-eyebrow-pulling of a lot.” We’re talking three cups, a third of a cup per serving.
But remember that, for all its coziness to soft white bread, mayonnaise is part of the French pantheon of recipes codified in the 19th century by renowned chef Marie-Antoine Carême. It’s haute cuisine. (Gooch likes to eat mac salad with pinot noir.) Elizabeth David, the British food scientist-revolutionary, declared in 1962: “It is one of the best and most useful sauces around.” Egg yolks and oil are transformed into one, never separated, two liquids – without a hint of heat, with only the steady beating of a whisk – into a snowy singularity, fluffy and thick, greater than the sum of its parts.
Farm to fork ends here for Gooch. There’s only one mayonnaise for its mac salad: Best Foods. If you live east of the Rockies, you know it as Hellmann’s, first bottled by a German immigrant in New York in 1912 and now anchored in homes all over Hawaii. “Some people love Kewpie and that’s fine, but it’s not mine,” Gooch says.
Note that Hawaii mac salad isn’t just a side dish; it is a seasoning in itself. Expand your mind. Chef Sheldon Simeon, at Tin Roof on Maui, is known for pureeing mac salad in a blender and straining it over cabbage, then adding kalbi beef drops into what he calls the “Bottom of the Plate Lunch” salad. calls. Gooch drops a scoop into beef stew, luscious upon luscious. “Fold um in,” he advises. “And g’nite.”
Recipe: Mac Salad
