FIRST LOVES

Or Love Hawaiian Style.

Nostalgia is mostly over-rated, especially when one is trying to keep sentimentality well out of one’s full-blown romanticism.

But first loves are in a category of their own.

My very first was eating flags on my first birthday at our farm in Stamford Connecticut. We left there for Australia when I was four, and I have been traveling ever since.

And, since then, I have had four serious pineapple loves.

And I remembered them all while sitting on my 12th floor balcony overlooking Waikiki at 6 a.m. as the first surfers swim out at sunrise, the crests of the waves foaming rose-colored in the early sun against the baby-blue water. I have to admit that these fifty-year-old memories are properly nostalgic, and quite possibly true. The pink Cadillac’s, real leis everywhere, only two hotels on the beach. The Royal Hawaiian.

Its rooms then $12-$25 dollars now $600, and down the beach from it the huge white Moana.

Both offering huge platters of tropical fruit and their juices in tall moist glasses, and the white sand beach barely populated with barely dressed good looking people.

Given that the round-trip first-class airfare then was $270, the equivalent of over $5,000 today, no wonder Waikiki then was uncrowded and chic.

Fifty years after I first sat in these same rooms waiting to fly out first class on a Pan American DC-3 converted warplane to Sydney.

My love affair with ripe and fragrant pineapple began in Fiji. I was 4. The very long trip from San Francisco to Hawaii was nothing compared to the four days it took to get to Sydney, and by the time we reached Fiji I had had it.

As soon as we stepped off the stairs down from the plane, I fell to the tarmac and wrapped my arms around a pole of the tiny terminal.

“No!” I screamed, meaning that I would never leave Fiji.

The screams summoned the police.

Only one showed up, but he was around seven feet tall if you count the hair combed straight up on his head and wrapped in a red ribbon, wore a white tapa cloth skirt, a military top, his size fifteen feet which were the first things I saw of him from my position of face firmly down in the dirt. If I couldn’t see the plane maybe it would go away.

At a close-up sight of the feet, it did.

He sat me on his deck chair sized lap and fed me a huge glass of chilled fresh pineapple juice. After days of warm water out of a cistern in the plane and seventy hours of airsickness, I fell in love. With policemen if they are Fijian, calm tropical air that smelled of frangipane, and ripe pineapples.

This was the easy love.

After riotous days of charming but lascivious French convicts being transported in the seats behind us from New Caledonia, we reached Sydney. Over the few years there my pineapple love continued, on Queensland plantations where aborigines looking like my policeman lopped off the top of pineapples picked ripe from the fields. and I could eat them with cupped fingers since there was no hard unripe core. But this was more of Fiji as far as I was concerned, and it wasn’t until we reached London a few years later that I had my second affair.

There it was.

Right in the middle of Harrods food hall, of food rationing, of a London winter, of a land still deprived of color and comfort by the war a few years before. There perched twenty feet up on a pyramid of fake fruit (there was no fruit available in London) was my little pineapple. It cost 28 shillings, over a fifth of the average weekly wage, so there was a large crowd of admirers standing and gaping. I begged my mother to buy it, and never stopped, until the very grand Hyde Park Hotel we were living in relented and found me some fresh pineapple. It was ghastly. I told them it could never have been that little one up near the ceiling at Harrods.

This was my impossible love.

My next love occurred when I was as head chef and co-owner of the little French Bistro Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California when in 1974 I did a week of menus from slightly modernized Escoffier. The dish that needed no modernity was “Peches Rose Cheri.” The name grabbed my immediate attention, even more than the ingredients: poached white peaches, pineapple ice, and raspberry sauce. When I tasted the combination, especially the pineapple with the white peach, I fell in love again.

This was self-love, since I thought of it alone.

25 years since those peaches in Berkeley, I was in Honolulu cooking. Remembering that pineapple ice, I poached white peaches, sieved the raspberries by hand to make the perfect sauce, and fell in love again, this time with the Kahili pineapples. They are almost white, and the scent that filled the kitchen, transported me back to Fiji and my policeman with his glass of fresh, ripe, chilled pineapple juice that saved my life on that white dead corral airstrip.

That nostalgia and probably a few too many glasses of champagne, made me lift off my multiple leis of pikake.

That most rich and restrained of jasmine, and throw them into the peach poaching liquid. Followed by a lei of pakalana to add a bit of spice.

The cooks around me were horrified. No one had ever cooked with these jasmine in Hawaii. “Are they poisonous,” they asked? “I have no idea”, I said, “but nothing that beautiful could be dangerous,” quickly adding, “as long as it isn’t human.”

The jasmine-pineapple-white peach ice was one of the best things I have ever tasted, and as cooks, guests, reporters and TV crews came in the kitchen to kiss me because of this godly ice.

I knew this was another pineapple love, or Love Hawaiian Style.

Poached Peaches with Berries & Shortbread

These shortbreads cut into stars were a standby at Stars restaurant in San Francisco, served with coffee at the end of private dining meals, the chocolate ones filled with vanilla-flavored mascarpone for a version we called “Stareos” that were a huge hit. With every customer, the staff, and Meals on Wheels aficionados at Rockefeller Center who ate the 3,500 of them that the Stars’ crew and I flew in one year.

Shortbread

8 ounces cold unsalted butter

½ cup sugar

2 cups flour

Pinch salt

Using an electric mixer, combine the butter and sugar and mix at low speed for 3 minutes or just until the dough pulls together.

Lightly flour a clean surface and roll out the dough to ¼-inch thickness. Use whatever shape cookie cutter you want or a glass dipped in flour, and cut out the shapes you want. Put them on a greaseproof paper lined tray and chill in the freezer (or refrigerator) for an hour.

Preheat the oven to 250 degrees.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or Silpat and put the cookies on the sheet with 1/2–inch space between them. Bake for about 45 minutes or until they are firm. Let cool on a rack.

The Fruit

3 ripe white peaches

1 cup light sugar syrup

1 small basket each raspberries and blackberries

2 tablespoons superfine sugar

1 cup whipping cream

3 tablespoons dark rum

Salt

Bring a 4-quart saucepan of water to a boil. Dunk the peaches into the boiling water for about 1 minute and then into a bowl of water filled with ice. Take the peaches out after a minute and slip off the skins and cutting the peaches in half, remove the pits. Smash open the pits and put them in the sugar syrup with the peach skins. Bring to a boil and simmer for 20 minutes. Strain and discard the skins and pits.

Meanwhile slice the peach halves in pieces ¼-inch thick. Add them to the strained skin juices, and simmer for 5-10 minutes depending on their ripeness. Pour into a glass bowl in an ice bath. Add and mix in gently the raspberries, blackberries, pinch salt, and rum.

While the peaches are cooling, beat the cream with the superfine sugar and pinch of salt and keep cold.

Warm the shortbread. Spoon the fruit on top of each shortbread or cookie, top with some whipped cream, and spoon the reduced fruit juices over the cream and around the plate.

Serve immediately.