Customer Reviews

Hawaiian Cookbook

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This book was really easy to use and didn't have a lot ofterminology or technique's that we're too "foreign" for usregular people. I have made at least a half a dozen different recipies out of this book so far. They have all turned out pretty well and had a lot of flavor. I am not a master chef by any means so I recommend this book to the simple cook!

This cookbook written by the mainland-american manager of the now-defunct Hawaii Kai restaurant in New York City represents the epitome of fine Tiki Restaurant Dining in the 1970s.

This style of cooking is perhaps best characterized as take-out Chinese food served with a slice of pineapple in a hollowed-out pineapple-shell used as a container, eaten in a restaurant decorated with carved wooden tikis, bamboo struts and thatched huts.

Half of this book is dedicated to this genre, where the actual recipes are very similar or even identical (soy sauce, sherry, ginger, garlic) but the presentations are elaborately different with an emphasis on outlandish (flambee recipes etc). Since the average reader scarcely have time to cook dinner, the advice on food presentation hardly seems relevant.

In the time since this book was written, the chinese tiki restaurant cuisine has evolved to Modern French or American cuisine with Asian ingredients, and these are the books that you can buy from the likes of Sam Choy et al, and these are the dishes that you will encounter in the fine dining hawaiian restaurants today.

Yet, what has always appealed to me about Hawaiian Cooking, is the more humble homecooking (today known as "plate lunches") that evolved from the simple traditional dishes that the plantation laborers from Asia and their Hawaiian polynesian spouses would make. This included grilled meats with asian marinade, japanese style fried cutlets, some chinese style noodle soups, and sadly only a small number of "real" polynesian dishes like laulau, kahlua pig, lomi salmon, haupia, and poi (perhaps less than a dozen of such traditional unadulterated polynesian recipes have survived).

Half of this book does try to address this wealth of simple but authentic home cooked dishes. But that is clearly not the strength or emphasis of this book, and in fact I'm not aware of ANY hawaiian cookbooks that seem to do these dishes any justice, and your best bet at the moment is to search for recipes on the internet.

I think that in emphasizing the "new" and "high class" restaurant style cooking be it from the 70s or today's contemporary cuisine, the cookbook authors have missed out on the true wealth of home cooked hawaiian cuisine that people in Hawaii eat everyday and perhaps take for granted, but for the rest of us living outside of Hawaii, it would be a priviledge to learn those recipes.

I was pleasantly surprised with how good this cookbook is. I am having a big luau in a few weeks and this book has been a huge help! Not only are the recipes easy to follow but most of them can be prepared ahead and frozen, with all the details included at the bottom of the recipe. I prepared many of them ahead, and of course had to sample each! The Bali Bali meatballs with sauce, excellent. The stuffed mushrooms Lelani, awesome and my kitchen smelled wonderful! I can't wait to make the Hawaiian Banana Pie and the Tahitian Chicken, not to mention the Baked Clams!! Too many to mention. If your planning a Luau and need some great easy to follow recipes, this is the book for you. I highly recommend it! Oh, and don't forget to try the Beef with Peanut Sauce and the BBQ'd Pork!!!

I would say that the other reviewers have accurately described this book, especially the one by " Doc Dave". Not much more that I can add, except that I am from the islands & was mostly curious about what this "Hawaii Kai" version had to offer. If I'm able to update my review once I do cook from the book, then I can offer up my opinion on the book's version of local recipes.