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The food was cooked in Polynesian style, by being wrapped up in greens called luau, and baked underground. There were two bullocks, nineteen hogs, a hundred fowls, any quantity of poi and fruit, and innumerable native dishes. Five hundred natives, profusely decorated with leis of flowers and maile, were there, and each brought a gift for the bride.
I call to mind the luau where Kalakua, the King, presided over the dispensation of stewed puppy, lifted to one's lips by brown but fair fingers, of live shrimps, of poi and taro and balls of boiled sea-weed stuffed with Heaven knows what; and to crown all, or to drown all, the insinuating liquor kava, followed when the festival was done by the sensuous but fascinating hula hula, danced by maidens of varying loveliness.
Taro, when baked, is an excellent and wholesome vegetable, and from its leaves is cooked a fine substitute for spinach, called luau. Poi also appears on your hotel table, being the national dish, of which many foreigners have become very fond. It is very fattening and easily digested, and is sometimes prescribed by physicians to consumptives.
They are hearty and even gross feeders; and probably the only christianized people who live almost entirely on cold victuals. A Hawaiian does not need a fire to prepare a meal; and at a luau, or feast, all the food is served cold, except the pig, which ought to be hot. Hospitable and liberal as he is in his daily life, when the Hawaiian invites his friends to a luau he expects them to pay.
The object of such a luau is usually to enable the giver to pay for his new house, or to raise money for some private object of his own. Notice of the coming feast is given months beforehand, as also of the amount each visitor is expected to give. It will be a twenty-five cent, or a fifty cent, or a dollar luau. The pigs the centre-piece of the feast have been fattening for a year before.
And there was a great resting time for an hour no luau, for the luau awaited them at the Parkers' but beer and stronger drinks for the men, and lemonade, and oranges, and refreshing watermelon for the women.
"I replaced more than double the quantity with what you paid me, so that at the next luau I catered one hundred and twenty plates without having to rent or borrow a dish or glass. Lord Mainweather gave that luau you remember him." "I was pig-sticking with him at Mana," the other nodded. "We were at a two weeks' house-party there.
This ornamentation does not look amiss on the young, for to youth much is forgiven; but it is a little startling, at a luau, to see old crones and grave grandfathers arrayed with equal gayety; and I confess that though while the flowers and leaves are fresh the decorated assembly is picturesque, especially as the women wear their hair flowing, and many have beautiful wavy tresses, yet toward evening, when the maile has wilted and the garlands are rumpled and decaying, this kind of ornamentation gives an air of dissipation to the company which it by no means deserves.
I call to mind the luau where Kalakua, the King, presided over the dispensation of stewed puppy, lifted to one's lips by brown but fair fingers, of live shrimps, of poi and taro and balls of boiled sea-weed stuffed with Heaven knows what; and to crown all, or to drown all, the insinuating liquor kava, followed when the festival was done by the sensuous but fascinating hula hula, danced by maidens of varying loveliness.
You and I never had a falling out." "Not even the night you gave that luau when you were twenty-one and insisted on breaking the glassware after every toast. But of course you paid for it." "Handsomely," he asserted almost pleadingly. "Handsomely," she agreed.