Haupia Period COrigin theory BVerified

Haupia is a white confection made by simmering the milk pressed from coconut with a starch, then chilling it until it sets. Long a favourite sweet at the luau, the Hawaiian feast, it is defined by its distinctive mouthfeel: soft enough to quiver, yet firm enough to slice with a knife.

Its ingredients all descend from plants the Polynesians carried in their canoes when they crossed the ocean and reached these islands. The coconut whose milk is pressed, the sugarcane (kō) that lends sweetness, and the arrowroot that binds the milk into shape, called pia in the islands' language, the starch drawn from the root of Polynesian arrowroot. People settled Hawaii around 250 to 450 AD, and these plants took root on the islands at about that time. The name of the confection speaks of its very materials: hau means "cold," and pia is this arrowroot starch. A chilled, set arrowroot sweet, its meaning carried straight into its name.

Haupia was made with the plants and skills the islanders had at hand. The coconut milk is set over a fire, pia starch is stirred in to thicken it, and it is then left to chill and set. Pia is itself an arrowroot with the power to gel the milk into a firm mass, and its action had been used in island life since prehistoric times. As a feast-day sweet, this confection stood complete on local materials and craft alone.

A certain story trails after haupia: that the confection took its present firm shape only after imported starches, cornstarch or Japanese kudzu, reached the islands in modern times. That trembling white form, the story goes, was something only a starch from elsewhere first made possible.

But the story has the order backwards. The arrowroot that has set haupia, pia, is no new starch from abroad. It is a native plant the Polynesians brought in their canoes, and long before Western ships appeared off Hawaii in 1778, islanders were setting coconut milk with this arrowroot into a sliceable sweet. Both botanical and cultural records tell us that pia is Polynesian arrowroot, rooted in Hawaii since prehistoric times.

Why, then, did the tale of imported starch arise? Pia is a laborious arrowroot: the root must be dug, crushed, and the starch washed out in water. When the plant grew hard to obtain in modern times, cheaper and easier cornstarch came to be used in its place. The finished mouthfeel shifted from that of the original arrowroot toward a springier, gelatin-like set. What the imported starch did was not to make possible a confection that had not existed, but to replace the contents of one that already did. Told with the modern starch as the starting point, this substitution can look as though it were the moment of birth. Haupia's true origin lies with the arrowroot rooted in the islands.