Julia Flynn Siler

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Lunching with One of Hawaii’s Real ‘Descendants’

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By Julia Flynn Siler, first published in the Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog on 3/12/2012

Julia Flynn Siler and Her Royal Highness Princess Abigail Kawananakoa.

A few days before heading to Honolulu on book tour for “Lost Kingdom,” I got a phone call from the assistant to Her Royal Highness Princess Abigail Kawananakoa, the woman who is the most direct descendant of the last queen of Hawaii. If the monarchy had not been overthrown in 1893, Princess Abigail today might well have become Hawaii’s queen.

I’d interviewed Princess Abigail by phone for a page one story I’d written last year for the Wall Street Journal. The story was about how the Friends of Iolani Palace, a group of volunteers founded by Princess Abigail’s mother, had been on a decades-long search to recover lost furniture and artifacts that disappeared in the months and years after a small group of businessmen deposed Queen Liliuokalani at the end of the nineteenth century.

While I’d visited Iolani Palace many times in the course of researching Lost Kingdom (the palace is on the same grounds as the Hawaii State Archives) I had not met Princess Abigail. Known by her Hawaiian name “Kekau” (pronounced kay-kow) the Princess is in her eighties and divides her time between homes in Honolulu and California. The last time a journalist had interviewed or spent any time with the Princess was for a Life magazine profile of her in 1998.

I was thrilled – and also a little terrified – when her longtime assistant, Maggi Parker, invited me to join the Princess for lunch at the Mariposa, the restaurant in the Nieman Marcus at Honolulu’s Ala Moana shopping center. What would I wear? What gifts should I bring? How should I address her? I wasn’t such a hard-bitten reporter that I didn’t fret over the etiquette required – even though our luncheon was taking place not at a palace, but at an all-American shopping mall.

I chose a conservative light -grey pants suit, which turned out to be a good pick for the occasion. I’d raced to a nearby stationery store before the lunch to buy a bright orange gift bag and pink tissue to wrap a bottle of Robert Mondavi cabernet I’d brought her from California, as well as a signed copy of my first book, “The House of Mondavi.”

As I rode the escalator up several floors to the restaurant, past hundreds of gold-colored butterflies suspended from the ceiling, I was damp with perspiration and worried I’d be late. As it turned out, I arrived before almost everyone else. The table was still being decorated with cuttings of delicate black-stemmed ferns – Queen’s Ferns, as it turned out —  from a guest’s garden, along with fuschia-colored orchid lei.

We sipped on blood-orange spritzers as we waited for the Princess’s chauffeur, driving her deep blue Rolls Royce, to drop her off. When she arrived, a ripple of excitement passed through the restaurant, as the manager and staff made a fuss over her, escorting an elegant octogenarian with carefully coiffed blonde hair who was wearing a flowing, cream and white silk pants suit to our long table. We sat with our backs to the wall where a large mural portrayed of hula dancers in grass skirts were dancing on a beach behind us. (The Princess later commented that the dancers didn’t look particularly Hawaiian to her.) Our view through the Mariposa’s windows was of the vast Pacific.

Fox Searchlight
George Clooney as Matt King and Shailene Woodley as Alexandra in “The Descendants.”

The occasion, as it turned out, was a celebration of her assistant Maggi’s birthday, which she had modestly forgotten to mention to me on the phone. Luckily, I’d brought her a small gift too. But Maggi had very kindly seated me next to the Princess, where I had the treat of hearing about her days as a boarder at Notre Dame High School in Belmont, Ca., a Catholic girls’ school outside of San Francisco.

The Princess was not entirely pleased by the service at the Mariposa: more than once, she extended her index finger at the overworked waitress, arched her eyebrows, and commanded her to bring drinks and menus to the table right now! I was secretly pleased to see that the Princess acted like, well, a princess. Later, Maggi explained to me that the Princess typically demanded excellent service and, in turn, was known for tipping generously.

Before the slices of Valharona chocolate cake arrived, Maggi’s friend Ann McCormack gave us a nice surprise. In the 1950s and 1960s, Ann had sung in the Honolulu nightclub that she had owned with her husband and toured with Frank Sinatra as his opening act in Las Vegas and elsewhere. At lunch, she sang a special birthday song for her long-time friend.

Ann and Maggi also swapped stories of appearing in small roles in the original “Hawaii Five-0″ and the movie “Hawaii,” based on James Michener’s 1959 novel. Ann and Maggi, it seems, were quite the girls-about-town in Honolulu during the 1950s and 60s. The funniest story involved Maggie once appearing onstage at the nightclub wearing a Playboy bunny’s outfit as a gag, and they reminisced over the filming of Hawaii, including one of the scenes shot at the Princess’s Honolulu home.

What a treat for me – and a big mahalo (thank you in Hawaiian) to Maggi for including me at such a lovely luncheon. After having spent the past four years digging through archives to write a book about the Princess’s family (she is the great-grand niece of King David Kalakaua and Queen Kapi’olani.) I was deeply honored by their interest in my book.

I couldn’t resist asking Kekau (yes, she invited me to call her that) whether she’d seen “The Descendants,” the Oscar-nominated movie starring George Clooney which is based on the novel by local writer Kaui Hart Hemmings (It’s out on DVD on March 13). She hadn’t – and while I offered to take her to the movies to see it – she was decidedly cool to the idea. It seemed that she hadn’t been to a commercial movie theater to see a film in a very long time.

To deepen the mystery, however, one of the other guests, Teri Stroud, seated to the other side of the Princess, leaned towards me. In a conspiratorial whisper, explained that the Princess was the real descendant  – in other words, the person upon whom the George Clooney character, Matt King, in “The Descendants” was based. In Kaui’s novel, Matt King was descended from Hawaiian royalty on one side and white sugar plantation owners on the other. The Clooney character describes himself as looking like a haole – the Hawaiian word for a foreigner, but generally used to describe a white person – even though he is part-Hawaiian.

Princess Abigail, likewise, does not resemble what  some think Hawaiian princess would look like. She told me at lunch that when she first arrived at her boarding school in California, she overheard some girls talking about her and wondering how fat and how dark-skinned she would be – not realizing they were being overheard. For the record, the Princess is light-skinned and slender with blue eyes. Like Matt King, she could easily be mistaken for a haole herself.

And like the Matt King character,  Princess Abigail is a member of a powerful family – the Campbells – which held many of their assets in a trust. Princess Abigail played a crucial role in 2007 in deciding what should happen to the Campbell Estate when it ran into a Hawaiian law, the rule against perpetuities, requiring it to wind down twenty years after the last death of the direct descendants who had been alive at the time of the trust’s creation.

The thirty beneficiaries of the trust are descended from James Campbell, an Irishman who immigrated to the islands in the mid-nineteenth century and who built his fortune as a partner in a Maui sugar plantation. According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, she was the largest beneficiary of the trust and her proceeds from it were close to a quarter of a billion dollars. She has used some of that wealth to help fund the Abigail K. Kawananakoa Foundation to support the preservation of Hawaiian culture.

That said, “The Descendants” author Hart Hemmings told me she’d based her fictional characters on a number of families and family trusts in the news at time she wrote her book – not just the Campbells. Another family that went through similar experiences were the Wilcoxes (whom the author Hart Hemmings is related to) according to friends that I met later in my trip and had drinks with at the Outrigger Canoe Club, one of the settings of Hart Hemmings’ novel. While the novel was based on an amalgam of powerful local families, it was still a great honor to meet Princess Abigail, who was born long before Hawaii became the 50th State and who’d lived through its tumultuous history.

How often, after all, does one have the chance to meet true American royalty?

Julia Flynn Siler is the bestselling author of “Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure,” published by the Atlantic Monthly Press. For more information, please visit www.juliaflynnsiler.com

My Conversion to Liking Breadfruit: “I’ve been ulu-cized!”

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When I arrived at a garden near the town of Captain Cook, on the big island of Hawaii, to attend a Breadfruit Festival in late September, I was a skeptic.

Prize-winning breadfruit tart at the inaugural Breadfruit Festival: Photo by Julia Flynn Siler

Beforehand, I’d talked to one of the world’s leading experts, the Breadfruit Institute’s Director, Diane Ragone PhD., who had told me she hadn’t cared for it when she first tried it. I’d learned from the Breadfruit Institute’s own website about the difficulties faced by Captain Bligh in fulfilling his mission of introducing breadfruit plants to the Caribbean (during the infamous mutiny on the bounty, the mutineers tossed the trees overboard.) I’d even found a discussion on the gardening website GardenWeb under lists of the “five WORST tropical fruits,” with one writer pronouncing breadfruit “nauseous.”

Diane Ragone, PhD., Director of the Breadfruit Institute, photo by Julia Flynn Siler

But when I arrived at the festival that day, my conversion began. Fragrant smoke rose from a fire circle where breadfruit roasted on burning coconut shells. (Watch video here) Women mashed the fruit with a pestle to make breadfruit poi, a traditional porridge-like food. The marvelously vivacious Chef Olelo pa’a Faith Ogawa, a Hawaii-born private chef, demonstrated several recipes to a rapt audience, passing out samples which were appreciatively wolfed down. A long line of people waited patiently that day to sample a special breadfruit lunch.

Chef Olelo pa’a Faith Ogawa, a Hawaii-born private chef, doing a cooking demonstration at the Breadfruit Festival, photo by Julia Flynn Siler

I’d bought a ticket to try a half dozen of the dishes entered into the cooking contest. To my surprise, several of them were delicious.

The one that comes immediately to mind was a recipe for Ulu Tart, (ulu is the Hawaiian word for breadfruit,)  which was made with two cups of cooked breadfruit, one cup of fresh coconut milk, Lehua honey, and a macadamia nut crust. It was superb – though the breadfruit itself was pretty much disguised by the coconut milk and honey.

I also tried a breadfruit casserole made with three different kinds of cheese as well as a very unusual ulu salad with cucumbers and dill, which, along with the tart, was also a prize-winner. I had the pleasure of meeting the person who came up with the salad recipe after he accepted his award for it.

His name was Nader “Nanoa” Parsia, who grew up in Persia before it became Iran. In the many years that he has lived on the islands, he told me he’d come to embrace the cooking and foods of his adopted home Hawaii. Smiling widely, he said “Some people have been baptized. Today, I’ve been ulu-cized!”

Nader “Nanoa” Parsia holding up his awards for breadfruit dishes, photo by Julia Flynn Siler

I felt the same way: I became a breadfruit believer that day too and greatly admire the work that Diane Ragone and her colleagues at the Breadfruit Institute as well as the Hawaii Homegrown Food Network are doing to introduce people to this nutritious food, particularly at a time when so many people are hungry. Mahalo for introducing me to it. I only wish I could have brought one of these beautiful trees home with me to California ~

Breadfruit tree sales at the inaugural Breadfruit Festival in Kona, photo by Julia Flynn Siler

 

Meeting the Alice Waters of Hawai‘i: Chef Alan Wong

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“Be sure to eat on the flight” the oft-repeated joke goes, “because the airplane meal is likely to be the best you’ll have on your trip to Hawai‘i.”

Honolulu magazine’s October cover story on Hawaiian regional cuisine traces that  jibe about the Aloha State’s supposed lack of gourmet dining to Bon Appetit’s former editor-in-chief Barbara Fairchild, who advised readers to enjoy the meal on the plane, because it was the best food they’d get on a Hawai‘i vacation.

These days, visitors with low culinary expectations about the islands are in for a surprise. I took a dozen or so trips to the Hawai‘i over the past four years to research Lost Kingdom and, each time,  enjoyed some terrific food, usually at hole-in-the-walls near downtown Honolulu, within easy walking distance of the Hawai‘i State Archives.

Chef Alan Wong wins an award for his second cookbook, The Blue Tomato

But my most memorable meals required short drives from downtown Honolulu: grilled garlic ahi at Irifune on Kapahulu Ave., a pork noodle soup at a Hawai‘ian Vietnamese restaurant called Hale Vietnam, off Waialae Ave., and lemon pepper shrimp from Macky’s Sweet Shrimp Truck on Oahu’s north shore. I generally ate at modestly priced places, but did splash out once for the Sunday brunch at the Halekulani in Waikiki, where both the food and the ocean view were spectacular.

I’d heard of Alan Wong, who has cooked for President Obama on a number of occasions, as well as his Pineapple Room in Honolulu’s Ala Moana Center, but had never made it there during one of my trips. But recently the James Beard Award-winning chef made it to San Francisco, courtesy of Watermark Publishing and the Hawai‘i Visitors & Convention bureau as part of a Taste Hawai‘i Tour of big west coast cities.

On one evening of his tour, a group of writers from the San Francisco Bay Area were invited to meet Chef Wong, who prepared a tasting menu for us. A broad shouldered man wearing chef’s whites, he was in fine form and sipping towards the end of the evening on a Napa cabernet. Accompanying him on the tour were a shrimp farmer from Kauai, a tomato grower from Ho Farms in Kahuku, and an agriculturalist working for the Dole Food Company, which is now experimenting with growing cacao in former pineapple fields.

Two decades ago, Alan Wong was one of twelve chefs who banded together to create a locavore movement they called Hawai’i Regional Cuisine, focusing on using locally-grown vegetables, milk and dairy products from local dairies, and seafood and beef from the islands. In recent years, he — like Chez Panisse‘s Alice Waters — has thrown his support behind the islands’  local producers and helped teach school children about food.

Regional cuisine was a movement catching on around the country at the time (in the early 1990s, I wrote a story about Midwestern chefs doing the same thing and, of course, the Berkeley’s own Alice Waters helped kick it off in the San Francisco Bay Area decades earlier.) The efforts of these pioneering Hawaiian chefs come at a time when the state is grappling with the question of how to reduce its dependence on foods imports.

That, in turn, is the sad legacy of the islands’ economic transformation from a time when native Hawaiians supported themselves by planting taro patches and building fish ponds. With the arrival of enterprising foreigners, these were subsumed during the nineteenth century by vast sugar plantations.

Now, the sugar industry is almost gone and more than a century of planting vast swaths of the islands with a single crop have taken a heavy environmental toll. As a result, Hawai‘i is left with an alarming dependence on imported food. Encouraging local farmers is a step in the right direction. Yet, many islanders simply can’t afford $3 tomatoes and $12.50 a pound frozen shrimp. Hence, much of the local food ends up in expensive restaurants catering to tourists.

Chef Wong, who attended a government hosted conference on food security for Hawai‘i recently, told me that if a natural or man-made disaster occurred and both container shipments and air cargo were halted, the Hawaiian islands would last just six days before running out of food. Apec Leaders meeting in November in Hawai‘i are likely to discuss this and other food security issues.

No doubt, the food at the Apec meeting, hosted by the East-West Center at the University of Hawai‘i will be delicious. And despite talk of potential food shortages in the case of an emergency, the evening with Chef Wong in San Francisco in late October was one of abundance, with tastes of more than a dozen of dishes from his new cookbook, The Blue Tomato.

Some highlights: a Hanaoka Farms ahi cerviche with pickled jalapeno and purple sweet potato, “Char Siu” lamb chops with hoisin-sriracha-five-spice greek yogurt, and a dish chef calls “Da Bag” – Kalua pig and steamed clams with shrimp, and lobster. Click here to watch the video of Chef Wong preparing “Da Bag.”

The chocolate crunch bars made from Dole’s Waialua Estate on the north shore of Oahu were memorable, too (the chocolate is available at Whole Foods stores in Hawai‘i) as was his pineapple shave ice. A lovely evening that raised some thought-provoking questions about the growing movement in Hawai‘i to support local agriculture and talented home-grown chefs.

How Novelist Kaui Hart Hemmings landed a role opposite George Clooney in “The Descendants”

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The statistics are daunting: less than two percent of all the books optioned for the screen ever enter production. Far fewer make it into theaters. My first book, The House of Mondavi was optioned twice, but never came close to becoming a movie.

That’s why it’s been a vicarious thrill to watch Kaui Hart Hemmings’ first novel, The Descendants, approach its release date of Nov. 18th as a  movie from Fox Searchlight.

Novelist Kaui Hart Hemmings, author of "The Descendants"

The Descendants was Kaui’s debut novel. A dark comedy about a dysfunctional family, it was first published in 2007 to critical acclaim. The New York Times called it “refreshingly wry.”

Around the time her book came out, Kaui was working out of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto and writing a hilarious blog called “How to Party with an Infant.” (Check out her excruciatingly funny post on bikini waxing, if you dare!) Her collection of short stories, House of Thieves, is stunning, particularly the title story.

I first met Kaui when I moderated a panel at Book Group Expo in San Jose. The theme of our panel was fractured families (under the title “Tales of Ruin and Renewal, even Triumph!“) I had just come out with my book on the Mondavis, and the panel also included Rich Cohen, who wrote the 2006 book on his family, Sweet and Low.

The Descendants was optioned by Alexander Payne, the director of the unexpected hit, “Sideways.”  Originally, Payne had not planned to direct the film. But, in chatting with Kaui by phone last week, she told me he’d emailed her sometime in 2008 to let her know he’d decided to direct it himself. He also offered to meet her in Hawaii that coming weekend.

“I was nervous about what wine to order,” Kaui told me. Sideways was the 2004 movie about a troubled oenophile, played by Paul Giamatti, who takes a road trip through Santa Barbara’s wine country involving too much wine and some romantic misadventures.

Kaui and her husband were headed to a birthday party the next day for Kaui’s aunt, held at her grandmother’s house. She invited Payne as well as set designer Jane Ann Stewart along “to hang out and see how these particular locals party.” That was the start of a friendship, as Kaui helped Payne scout locations, particularly after he decided to rent a home in the lush Manoa Valley, a few miles inland of downtown Honolulu, for about eight months.

“He almost approached it as if he were making a documentary,” she says. He met with the island’s big landowners, visited the Outrigger Club, a key setting in the novel, and met Kaui’s famous step-father, the champion surfer-turned-politician Fred Hemmings, Jr. (Kaui was adopted by him when she was 11 years old.)

“I had expected someone to just parachute in and write the screenplay,” she says, but found that Payne took his task of translating her novel, set in contemporary Hawaii, seriously — allowing him to add such details as the sounds of the geckos chirping in the background. Payne talks about this in a Q&A following a screening at the recent Hawaii International Film Festival.

The novelist and director struck up a friendship and Kaui ended up reading the screenplay and reviewing the casting videos, as well as discussing details down to the wardrobes that key characters would wear.

“I felt like I haven’t had the typical experience” of a novelist whose book becomes a movie, Kaui told me. She was free to visit the set every day, if she wanted to, and she ended up landing a bit part as the secretary of Matt King, the character descended from Hawaiian royalty and sugar plantation owners that George Clooney plays.

Her big moment?  “Matt, your cousins are here.” Thinking back on it, she recalls that she needed to work on her intonation and deliver the line more naturally. “It took a long time to say a few lines,” she says.

To play the part, the film’s hairdresser styled her hair and its makeup artist brushed rouge onto her cheeks and mascara onto her eyelashes. Someone from the wardrobe department picked her outfit for her. It felt “surreal” to her to be a non-actor playing a role in a movie modeled after her real world.

“It was just me and George in this room. What am I doing here with George Clooney, I kept asking myself, I’m not supposed to be here, but thanks!”

She, her husband, and her mother were hired as extras for a party scene in the movie, playing themselves. Scenes that took place at the Outrigger were moved to the Elks Club next door, since the Outrigger wouldn’t permit Payne’s crew to film there, Kaui says.

But aside from not having the party at the club itself, other details were spot on – including party-goers dressed in aloha attire and the food including poke (a raw tuna salad, usually made with soy sauce, green onions, and sesame oil) and chicken long rice, a dish brought to the islands by Chinese workers contracted to work in the sugar fields and a Hawaiian luau staple.

The movie’s production designer, Jane Stewart, credits Kaui for helping her get the local details just right. One example was that Kaui introduced her to the pune’e, the casual Hawaiian daybeds often used as sprawling sofas.

Much of The Descendants’ soundtrack is by local musicians, including slack key guitarist Gabby Pahinui, Keola Beamer,  Ozzie Kotani and Daniel Ho, as well as many others. There’s even a song in it written by the last queen of Hawaii, Lili’uokalani, the central character in my next book, Lost Kingdom.

Kaui’s six-year-old daughter made it into the film, too, as an extra in a beach scene in Hanalei Bay. “She was very proud of the $100 she made,” Kaui recalls. But that’s nothing compared to what her talented mom might earn from sales of her book following the film release.

Random House has published a new edition of the book, with none other than George Clooney himself on the cover, looking thoughtfully towards his character Matt King’s daughters on the beach. The word is that they’ve printed 80,000 copies of the paperback for their initial print run. Kaui must be getting chicken skin!

 

Kava in South Kona

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The 'Awa plant, also known as Kava

I caught a glimpse of the sign out of the corner of my eye: “Ma’s Nic Nats & Kava Stop.” I made a quick U-turn on the Mamalahao Highway in South Kona and headed back, pulling across from a laundromat where children chased each other outside as their parents waited for clothes to dry.

From the outside, the kava bar didn’t look like much. But it was starting to rain and I had another hour before I could check into my hotel room. So I climbed out of my car and walked in.

It was a tiny place, with perhaps 10 seats. Tending bar was Ma, the kava stop’s namesake. A Hawaiian woman with a broad smile, she welcomed me in. The bar itself was made of carved mango wood, salvaged from trees cut down to make way for a new coffee plantation.

A young woman from Northern California sat on a bar stool. Her two friends, refugees from Colorado who’d moved to the islands five years ago, sat at a small table. They all held coconut shells with long straws sticking out. Sipping kava mixed with pineapple and coconut juice, they all had relaxed smiles on their faces.

“Try this” Ma told them, as she handed them a long slice of dried fish. “It real ono.”

She made me the same $5.00 kava drink. It tasted good, though I later realized she’d given me a beginner’s draw, nice and sweet. Within a couple of minutes, my mouth began to tingle and I started to feel light-headed. I drank more. (Kava, like coffee, is not regulated.)

I’d seen an awa plant, which the drink is made from, that morning at the Bishop Museum’s Amy B. H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden in South Kona,.  A member of the black pepper family, roots of the kava (which is the name for it in Tonga and the Marquesas – Hawaiians call it ‘awa) were traditionally chewed. Then the chewed mass was put into a bowl, mixed with water, and strained.

When the first European visitors came to the Hawaiian islands in the late eighteenth century, Polynesians would offer their drink made from the kava root to these honored guests. It also played a part in religious ceremonies as an offering to the gods.

Nowadays, machines macerate the dry roots into a fine powder which is then mixed with water. The drink’s allure comes from kavalactone, a compound which acts as a relaxant or sedative, with a mild numbing effect. It doesn’t seem to effect mental clarity.

When I told a new friend about my experiment with kava later that night, he laughed and described it as being “sort of like a mud Novocain drink.” He and his wife had tried it in Samoa, where — to hear him tell it — the roots are ground up along with a lot of dirt, making drinking it an experience not unlike sipping from a mud puddle.

Oddly, kava bars are starting to pop up on the mainland, including one called the “Kahuna ‘Awa Kava Bar” in Deerfield Beach Florida. The Yelp reviews of this place are probably more fun to read than the experience of drinking kava itself.

Rony, from Miami, was shocked by the price:  “$25 a bowl! Is this stuff harvested by Swiss financial planners?” Another described it as tasting like “pistachio nut shells covered in dirt.”

Mine actually tasted pretty good. Maybe Ma just has a better recipe. She offered my kava up with sweet aloha, giving me a warm hug goodbye. But I don’t think I’ll empty another coconut shell of the stuff anytime soon. I’d love to visit Ma again, but next time will just order a smoothie — hold the kava.

Searching for Kau Kau

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I first came across the word kaukau in a note that the Hawaiian Princess Ka‘iulani wrote to Robert Louis Stevenson more than a century ago.

The Scottish novelist and his family had arrived in Honolulu in the afternoon of January 24, 1889, and the beautiful princess dropped them a short note, inviting them to her family’s estate and adding that “Papa promises “good Scotch kaukau….”

To try to track down the word’s meaning, I went to the Hawaiian Electronic Library Web site, which searches several Hawaiian dictionaries simultaneously. But because Hawaiian words can have multiple meanings depending on their diacritical marks (which weren’t used in the 19th century) the modern Web site offered an array of possible spellings and definitions.

RL Stevenson and Kaiulani on a postage stamp

The relationship between R.L. Stevenson and Ka'iulani was depicted on a commemorative postage stamp in 2000.

Could it mean “to slow down, linger or procrastinate?” Hmm. Stevenson and Ka‘iulani did famously sit together under the spreading banyan tree at ‘Āinahau, her family’s estate at Waikīkī. But probably not, given the context of the sentence.

Or did kaukau mean, in another definition, “a hemorrhoid or exterior obstruction to bowel evacuation”? Almost certainly not. A well-educated Victorian lady, no matter how earthy her humor might have been, would never had written such a thing to the eminent author of of Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped!.

Or could it be Pidgin, the uniquely Hawaiian language that developed from the islands’ mix of immigrant influences? Checking a Pidgin-specific dictionary at e-Hawaii.com, the definition was “food; meal; to eat.” This clue led me to the right entry on the original dictionary site.

Bingo!

Author Arnold Hiura and his book Kau Kau

Arnold Hiura signs a copy of his book. (photo courtesy Arnold Hiura)

This week in Honolulu, I came across the word kaukau again, in a small notice for a talk on Sunday afternoon by Arnold Hiura at Native Books in the Ward Warehouse. In his first book, titled Kau Kau: Cuisine & Culture in the Hawaiian Islands, Hiura relates that growing up,  “when someone bellowed,  ‘Kau kau time,’” it was the equivalent of saying “Chow time!” or “Come and get it!”

Originally he’d thought the word was from the native Hawaiian language. But over the three years he took to write his marvelous food history of the islands, he learned the original derivation of the word, stemming from “chow chow,” which is Chinese for “food.”

The mystery deepens, though. Chinese contract workers were first brought to the islands in 1852 to labor on sugar plantations. Would the princess, who was born in 1875 and died at age 23 in 1899, have known the slang that these workers used to describe their food?

The fact is that by 1889, when Ka‘iulani wrote her note, Chinese cultural influence on the islands was ubiquitous enough to have influenced everyday language at all levels of society. By the 1884 census, according to Thrum’s Hawaiian Annual, there were nearly 18,000 Chinese in Hawai‘i, making them the largest immigrant group by far – dwarfing the American presence and rapidly catching up to the native Hawaiian population, which had dwindled to just over 40,000. Honolulu’s Chinatown had long been a bustling waterfront commercial hub, and in 1889 the district was rapidly recovering from a fire three years earlier that destroyed 7,000 Chinese homes and caused $1.5 million in damage (more than $30 million today).

Hiura himself grew up on a sugar plantation on the Island of Hawai‘i, working there periodically until his early twenties. He remembered how he and the other workers would stop work when the whistle blew mid-day and take out their metal lunch cans – the bottom half filled with rice and the top with vegetables or pickles. They’d all squat down to eat, reaching over and picking from their co-workers’ cans for tastes of different toppings.

The night before his book talk, he and his wife Eloise had attended a “plantation potluck” in Hilo in which everyone brought their favorite dishes from the old days, when the islands still had sugar plantations (there is only one left now: the Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. on Maui). As they described the way in which sharing their food created feelings of closeness, another Pidgin term popped up: real ono – an allusion to the prized ono tuna fish, slang among young Hawaiians for something truly fabulous.

Mo’ Bob Mon …

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The elegant Mondavi arts center, above, is a dramatic addition to the rural landscape of Davis — and it will soon be joined by the Robert Mondavi Institute, depicted in an artists’ rendering below.
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Anyone driving east from San Francisco on Highway 80, the 10-lane transcontinental highway to Nevada and points east, can’t miss the name Mondavi. In California’s Central Valley, where the Mondavi family first made its name in the grape wholesaling business in the 1920s and then became America’s foremost wine dynasty, Robert and Margrit Mondavi have passed into legend – so much so that their names are heralded for all to see from the freeway.
This past week, I gave talks on my book, The House of Mondavi, in Sacramento and the nearby town of Davis, where the University of California’s renowned viticulture program is based. Davis is home to both the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts and the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science. You can see the sign for the Mondavi Center on one side of the I-80 and the construction site for the new RMI on the other.
When I told a good friend from Alabama about these author events, she teased, “Oh, Julie, it’s just Mo’ Bob Mon …” — meaning that talking about the late Bob Mondavi had become a long-standing routine. In fact, it’s been Mo’ Bob Mon for more than 15 months now, and that’s why I was was not much looking forward to what had threatened to be a long and taxing day in the Central Valley.
But to my surprise, the two events were some of the liveliest and most though-provoking I’ve yet attended. The first took place at a breakfast for about 50 members and guests of the Capital Region Family Business Center, a non-profit group made up of second-, third-, and even a few fourth- and fifth-generation members of local family businesses.

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Copia chairman asks: “Can it survive?”

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Sparse crowds at Copia have contributed to its financial challenges.
(Photo from Sacbee.com – Owen Brewer / Sacramento Bee file, 2002)

Despite my intention to take a summer sabbatical, an investigative story that appeared on the front page of last Sunday’s Sacramento Bee brought me back to my keyboard. The story raises some new questions about Robert Mondavi’s philanthropic legacy, a subject I explored in The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty.
An enterprising reporter for The Bee named Andrew McIntosh broke the news that Copia, the nonprofit brainchild of Robert Mondavi devoted to wine, food and the arts in downtown Napa, was bailed out by a state-owned bank that might now be liable if the center fails to recoup its losses. In the mid-1990s, Robert Mondavi had donated $20 million to found Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts. Ever since the 80,000-square-foot building opened in 2001, the center has struggled with low attendance, financial troubles, and a confused mission.

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King Lear and The House of Mondavi

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Two kings: Ian Holm as Lear and Robert Mondavi.

Photo of Holm from the University of London; photo of Mondavi by Mike Kepka/SFGate.com

What can Shakespeare teach us about a troubled family business?
That’s a question I’ll try to answer at a discussion hosted by a long-lasting and large book group in Burlingame, Calif., this fall. Over the summer, the group has decided to read Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear, alongside my book, The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty.
To prepare myself for the evening, I’ve checked out the DVD of the Royal National Theatre’s celebrated production of King Lear with Ian Holm (which I had the great fortune to see performed in London in 1997) from our local public library. I’ve also checked out the Cliff Notes on King Lear, as well as the text of the play itself (the Pelican Shakespeare edition of the 1608 Quarto and 1632 Folio Texts).

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Edible Portland

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David Schargel, in blue, offers “epicurean excursion” participants a sampling of Portland’s culinary prowess; below, a sampling of the single-source chocolates from Sweet Masterpiece, one of the excursion’s ports of call.
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(Photos by Aaron Rabideau)

The last stop on my paperback tour for The House of Mondavi was Portland, Oregon, where I can truthfully, if somewhat reluctantly, report that I found what seems to be a city even more obsessed with good food than my own San Francisco Bay Area.
Although I only spent about 48 hours in Portland, I managed to pack in a whirlwind tour of the city’s culinary delights, thanks, in large part, to a couple of hours spent with David Schargel, founder of Portland Walking Tours, and his company’s recent offering: an “epicurean excursion.”
I’d been tempted by an email pitch from David’s public relations firm. Knowing I’d have a few hours between interviews and my talk at Powell’s City of Books, I plunked my $59 fee down for a guided tour of the city’s marvelous Pearl District, a former industrial area now populated by all sorts of artisan food producers.

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