“I’ve tried a lot of things to make it better, but it always goes back to that routine, basic salad,” Choy says of his restaurant-served rendition. While Simeon claims he would “go crazy” with vinegar in mac salad, Kysar asks, “Where’s the tang? It’s so flat if you don’t put vinegar in!” The mosaic of recipes, she explains, “says a lot about this plantation era when there was scarcity of ingredients and resources that required getting creative to stretch your meals.” Both versions of mac salad that made it into her book (a classic mac salad and a potato mac salad) include these additions, as well as grated carrot and onion. “Every family thinks theirs is the best.” Kysar grew up on Maui eating her mother’s potato mac version, which, in a slight departure from tradition, included sweet pickle relish and juice. “It’s like Bolognese sauce,” Alana Kysar, author of Aloha Kitchen: Recipes From Hawai’i, explains. Other cooks maintain peas or kamaboko (fish cake) are fair game. Sam Choy, chef and author of multiple cookbooks on Hawaii cuisine, enjoys hard-boiled eggs and fatty roasted tuna in his homemade style. Growing up, his family recipe included equal parts spaghetti noodles and potatoes. At Tin Roof Maui, Simeon serves Ulu (breadfruit) mac salad for a distinctly local spin. Never al dente, the noodles are served overcooked so they balloon slightly, like bloated rainbows.įrom that base, inventive variations have emerged. Old-school styles call for grated, liquid-y onion (although the chefs I spoke with say that this spoils quickly). Unlike its Anglo counterpart, Hawaiian mac salad tends to shun vinegar and mustard it eschews sugar and MSG (which some vintage recipes include), favoring Best Foods (also known as Hellmann’s) mayonnaise instead. At his restaurant Lineage, on Maui, he serves what’s called “Bottom of the Plate Lunch” with pureed mac salad for the “perfect viscosity.”
“With all the big flavors we have in Hawaii, it’s a good moment to fill your palate and get a balanced bite,” Simeon explains of mac salad’s presence on the plate. Today it graces menus across the islands, from food trucks to fast-casual places, local diners and modern contemporary places.
The meal (which still consists of barbecued meat, steamed white rice, mac salad, and perhaps some greens) represents almost every ethnic group in Hawaii on one platter. By the 1930s, street vendors in pushcarts started selling plate lunches along Honolulu’s waterfront, cementing mac salad’s place in Hawaii’s culture. Mac salad neutralized these salty, sweet, sauce-heavy proteins, adding extra calories at little additional cost and rounding out the meal. As sustenance to fuel their grueling work in the fields, these migrant laborers brought metal kau kau (food) tins packed with leftover white rice and meat dishes that originated in their homelands-staples like teriyaki beef or chicken katsu (Japan), kalbi or meat jeon (Korea), shoyu chicken (China), and beef stew or kalua pork (Hawaii). “One is the influence coming through European chefs in Waikiki hotels the other is from plantation managers who were also of European stock but who had local, usually Asian, housekeepers and chefs and gardeners.” People adapted the dish to suit their pantries and budgets, boiling dry elbow macaroni because the noodles were cheap and imperishable (unlike potatoes) and mixing it with heaps of mayonnaise because it was easy to whisk together at home.Įventually mac salad became a staple of the plate lunch: an affordable meal that first emerged on plantation fields around the 1900s. But according to Arnold Hiura, the author of Kau Kau: Cuisine & Culture in the Hawaiian Islands, the dish has a few possible origins. With its European-leaning ingredients-namely, pasta and mayonnaise-mac salad is an unlikely dish for Hawaiians to rally around. Zippy’s, Hawaii’s favorite diner, makes 46,000 pounds of it every month. He’s talking about Hawaiian mac salad: a clumpy and creamy dish that resembles a Midwestern mush yet remains beloved by locals. “There’s nothing indigenous or rooted to the land of Hawaii,” Maui chef Sheldon Simeon tells me.
It’s a creamy, mutable, cost-effective way to round out a classic plate lunch of salty meats and fluffy white rice.