The cuisine of Hawaii incorporates how many distinct styles of food reflecting the diverse food history of settlement and immigration in the Hawaiian Islands, in the pre-contact period of Ancient Hawaii (300 AD–1778), Polynesian voyagers brought plants and animals to the Islands?
Cuisine of Hawaii The cuisine of Hawaii incorporates five distinct styles of food reflecting the diverse food history of settlement and immigration in the Hawaiian Islands. In the pre-contact period of Ancient Hawaii (300 AD–1778), Polynesian voyagers brought plants and animals to the Islands. As Native Hawaiians settled the area, they fished, raised taro for "poi", planted coconuts, sugarcane, sweet potatoes and yams, and cooked meat and fish in earth ovens. After first contact in 1778, European and American cuisine arrived along with missionaries and whalers, who introduced their own foods and built large sugarcane plantations. Christian missionaries brought New England cuisine while whalers introduced salted fish which eventually transformed into the side dish lomilomi salmon.
Pidgin Hawaiian Pidgin Hawaiian was a pidgin spoken in Hawaii, which drew most of its vocabulary from the Hawaiian language and could have been influenced by other pidgins of the Pacific region. Emerging in the mid-nineteenth century, it was spoken mainly by immigrants to Hawaii, and died out in the early twentieth century. Like all pidgins, Pidgin Hawaiian was a fairly rudimentary language, used for immediate communicative purposes by people of diverse language backgrounds, but who were mainly from East and South-East Asia. As Hawaiian was the main language of the islands in the nineteenth century, most words came from this Polynesian language, though many others contributed to its formation. In the 1890s and afterwards, the increased spread of English favoured the use of an English-based pidgin instead, which, once nativized as the first language of children, developed into a creole which today is misleadingly called Hawaiian 'Pidgin'. This variety has also been influenced by Pidgin Hawaiian; for example in its use of the grammatical marker "pau".