Pre-contact Native Hawaiian raw fish dish (pre-soy-sauce precursor to poke) Period BOrigin theory BVerified

The setting is pre-contact Hawaiʻi, from antiquity to the close of the eighteenth century. What people ate here was a dish of reef fish and ʻahi (tuna), caught fresh and cut into cubes, then dressed with paʻakai (sea salt), limu (seaweed), and inamona, the roasted and pounded meat of the kukui nut.

Every element came from the islands themselves. The fish came from the surrounding sea, the salt from seawater, the limu from the tide pools, and the kukui nut from the island trees. For the common people, the makaʻāinana, these were the everyday makings of daily life. Even the method was a local one: the word poke itself meant to cut crosswise. A close survivor of this older form is lomi ʻōʻio, in which the bony fish ʻōʻio is worked and dressed with salt; it has come down almost unchanged.

Under the kapu, the system of sacred prohibitions that governed food, such dressed dishes made from shallow-water fish were open to commoners as well, while the deep-sea fish were reserved for those of higher rank. This was not festival food but an ordinary fish dish that belonged to the everyday table.

The poke that comes to mind today glistens with soy sauce and sesame oil and is scattered with green onion and chili. That flavor is not as old as it seems. Soy sauce, sesame oil, chili, and green onion were all later additions, brought by the Asian immigrants who came to the islands across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the original dish had none of them.

The confusion lies in the gap between a name and the dish itself. As a term for raw fish, poke did not spread until the 1960s at the earliest, as the food historian Rachel Laudan notes. Yet the practice of dressing cubed fish with local salt, seaweed, and kukui nut reaches back far earlier, into pre-contact antiquity, long before the name existed. To treat the first appearance of the word as the birth of the dish is to miss the far older reality of the food. That is why this earlier layer is drawn along the line of the native preparation itself, not the name.

The pre-contact form is recorded by the Bishop Museum and by Rachel Laudan's history of Hawaiian food, The Food of Paradise (1996), as the native combination of salt, limu, and inamona. Lomi ʻōʻio, still made much as it always was, is the living witness to it.