FOOD FOR THOUGHT

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

Cane Haul Road or some company like it needs to make a T-shirt about pork and beans sandwiches.

Because when you think about it, the idea is weirder than Spam, and yet it's such a Hawai'i thing.

Or was. I don't think there's been a can of pork and beans in my cupboard in a decade. But pork and beans sandwiches were a staple for Grandma and Mom. We ate them when spring cleaning — a truly fearsome pursuit when Portuguese women are involved. Grandma wouldn't want us to lose momentum, so she'd run into the kitchen and open a can, slap some Best Foods on a few slices of bread, pour on the beans and we'd eat standing up, the juice oozing onto our hands.

Loretta Watts e-mailed to say that "being of Portuguese ancestry, pork and beans play a very important part in my culinary life." She didn't get them all that often at home, but recalls visiting her auntie's house and staying overnight with her four cousins, who would often be given pork and beans sandwiches in their school lunch bags. "It was heaven. Not until I was an adult was I aware that my cousins were not as happy as I was with the choice of sandwiches." She still likes to bake pork and beans with onions, Portuguese sausage and a little tomato sauce and brown sugar, then serve the baked beans on buttered, toasted wheat bread for breakfast.

Lokelani Rosehill, formerly of Kailua and now living in California, says pork and beans sandwiches were her favorite. "It absolutely has to be Van Camp's Pork and Beans (right out of the can) and Best Foods mayonnaise, and the more mayo, the better. On soft wheat bread. My mouth is watering already!"

Laura B. Martin-Robley, a longtime cooking demonstrator for groups including HECO and the United Puerto Rican Association, takes an almost scholarly interest in the PB sand. She wrote about how her mother would open several cans of Van Camp's and pour them into a large hand sieve over a bowl to drain the gravy. She would then sprinkle a little black pepper over it and mix in the mayonnaise.

"The neighborhood children would wrinkle their noses at first until they got brave enough to try it. Once doing so, they were hooked," she wrote in a letter from her 'Aiea home. She really got the details right when she noted that the juice would run down your chin until you learned to suck in as you bit into the bread.

Ruthie Garza, of Papakolea, now living on Kaua'i, recalled pork and beans sandwiches as beach food. "The convenience of taking the can opener to the beach made it a winner. When you run out of beans, the sauce OK, too. Broke da mouth!"

And, finally, letter writers remembered fighting over who would get that lone, pale piece of fat, the only trace of pork in the whole can.