Posted on: Wednesday, July 14, 2004

By Wanda Adams

"Best of the Best from Hawai'i Cookbooks," compiled by Barbara Moseley and Gwen McKee (Quail Ridge Press, spiral-bound, $16.95), is the latest entry in a multistate series. Moseley and McKee have made a career of cherry-picking representative recipes (with permission) from popular cookbooks. They say their aim is to preserve beloved recipes, because many sources are out of print, hard to find or circulated only locally.

To me, the best part of this book was paging through the credits section at the back, recalling books I used to own (where did my copy of Cass Castagnola's "Cooking Italian in Hawaii" go?) and noting books I always meant to get (the complete set of Honpa Hongwanji "Favorite Island Cookery"). The more than 60 books the women scanned include several of the most respected (the Junior League cookbooks, Maili Yardley's classic "Hawaii Cooks Throughout the Year," Jean Watanabe Hee's "Best Local" series, the award-winning "Kona On My Plate").

McKee and her husband traveled here to research recipes. They seem to have made the most of random encounters as well, snagging a recipe for the Punalu'u Shrimp Shack's scampi, written down for them on a brown paper bag.

They have included pretty much all the must-haves — chicken long rice, pan sushi, huli-huli chicken, butter mochi, laulau, kal-bi, Portuguese bean soup. But they're a little hung up on "tropical" fruit drinks and "Polynesian" salads of the sort most of us never serve.

Predictably, there are a couple of howlers, such as claiming that "kama'aina" used to mean born here but now means "well-to-do haole locals who have been in the Hawaiian Islands for several generations." Eh??

And the inadequate taro entry in the glossary, copied almost word for word from Sharon Tyler Herbst's "Food Lover's Companion," betrays the editors' shallow understanding of the subject.

It annoys me is that the editors never give the last name of anyone they quote, and never credit the recipes to individuals, even when the introductory language uses the word "I."

If I sound cranky, I am. I realize the books in this series have been popular and perhaps lend new life to older cookbooks. But solid, original research and recipe testing is hard work, and I'm uncomfortable with borrowing other people's efforts and purporting to understand the "best" of a place without knowing it very well.

P.S. Recipe requests return in a couple of weeks — I may have found the mother lode of school-days recipes!