Rachel Laudan The Food of Paradise, Exploring Hawaii's Culinary Heritage (1996)

Podstrony

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
." Inside are small piles of dirt (a couple of wheelbarrows or so) and a series of pits about thewidth of a man's outstretched arms.These are the salt ponds that gave the name to Salt Pond Beach.Every spring, local Hawaiian families that belong to the Hui Hana Pa'akai o Hanapepe (the Salt Association ofHanapepe) came (and still come) here to make salt by the ancient methods.2 The season opened in May when themarshy waters of the rainy season receded.The ponds were cleared and a piece of iron was used to smooth the roughclay to a leakproof finish.When that had dried in the sun, old cans and buckets were lowered by rope into wells tohaul up brackish water and transfer it to a curing pond.After evaporating for 34 days, it was carried to the shallowdrying basin.After another 2 or 3 days, crystals began to form and float to the surface; as the water evaporated, morewas poured in from the curing pond.When 3 inches of pure salt had formed, it was harvested by pushing long-handled rakes across the basin and piling it into a bamboo basket.Tossing the basket and rubbing the large crystalsin the palmsPage 235of their hands, the workers broke the salt down, piled it in mounds, and left it to dry for a week before bagging it.RED SALT?Yes, Hawaii has red salt.It is called alaea salt and it has been mixed withferruginous red earth.The Hawaiians reserved it for important feasts; todayit can be bought in any grocery store and is popular for the flavor it adds togrilled meat and fish.Surrounded by millions of square miles of salt water, the Hawaiians still needed usable salt.Like the Roman soldier,sweating for his salary, like the French peasant crying out against the salt tax, like the Indians who followed Gandhion the salt march to the sea, they could not live without it.They needed it to season their often-bland foods, and theyneeded it to preserve fish for the times when the sea was too rough to venture out.In some areas, Kaena Point on Oahu or Kalaupapa on Molokai, the Hawaiians could simply collect salt from therocky shoreline.High seas leave pools of salt water and when the steady sun evaporated these, the encrusted layersof salt could be scooped up.Once the salt was placed in gourds or baskets; now it is placed in grocery bags or burlapsacks and dried over discarded inner-spring coils.3In other areas, such as Salt Pond Beach, the Hawaiians excavated salt ponds.Captain George Vancouver admiredthose on the barren lands of Kawaihae on the northern end of the Big Island when he visited the Islands in 1793.4But Hawaii's most exotic source of salt was nothing less than a whole briny lake in an old volcanic crater betweenwhat is now downtown Honolulu and Pearl Harbor.5 This became quite a tourist attraction, described as containingfathomless depths and as rising and falling with the tide.These mysteries were dispelled by Lieutenant CharlesWilkes.He surveyed it when he touched in at Hawaii on the Great Exploring Expedition of 18391842 and brisklydismissed local lore about its unplumbed depths and changing levels.The salt vanished when the crater was plantedto cane, and artesian wells freshened the water.Now the neighborhood called Salt Lake is covered with high-riseapartment buildings.For a number of years, salt provided a steady source of revenue for the Hawaiians.The four hundred or so vessels ayear, most of them whalers, that anchored in the Islands in the mid-nineteenth century demanded salt meats forreprovisioning.Traders and shippers also bought salt to sell in the North Pacific.In 1842, for example, the HudsonBay Company ordered several shipments, ranging in size from 500 to 1,000 barrels for their settlements on theColumbia River.Adopted from seamen soon after European contact, salt meat and fish remain favorites of the Hawaiian diet.WhenR.H.Dana sailed to the Pacific he was appalled by all the salt junk he had to eat.He was still bemoaning it in 1840in his memoirs, Two Years before the Mast.6 The term "salt junk" apparently came from the seamen's word for oldor inferior rope or cables.They applied it derisively to the tough and chewy salt beef that, together with salt pork,was thePage 236A small traditional salt pan, Kohala Coast of the Big Islandonly meat seamen (or, come to that, the urban poor or until quite recently even the well-to-do in winter) ever got toeat.It was not a new word.In the eighteenth century, the novelist Tobias Smollet had one of his characters insultanother's mistress by saying that he valued her no more than "old junk, pork-slush, or stinking stock-fish." 7 Junk ornot, salt beef was in great demand in Hawaii, both for reprovisioning the passing ships and for preservation in thetropical climate.As soon as there were cattle to be had in the Islands, salt beef became a part of the Hawaiian diet [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

zanotowane.pl

doc.pisz.pl

pdf.pisz.pl

bezglutenowo.pev.pl