Poke Fish Dish

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. It’s Leslie in Dallas, Texas.

Hello, Leslie. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Leslie.

Thank you. Hi, Martha.

I was listening to one of your recent shows, and you guys threw out a question that I thought was fantastic, which was about food items that are named after the technique used to create them. And I think pickle was the example. And I have one for you, and it’s poke. It’s that Hawaiian chopped tuna dish that has become hugely popular in my neck of the woods, and I’ll bet in your neck of the woods, too.

Oh, yeah, definitely. That’s a great example.

So you know a little bit about this, I guess.

Yeah, so I’m a restaurant critic here in Dallas for the Dallas Morning News, and I’ve actually been thinking a lot about poke recently. I wrote a story about it and so looked into why it’s called poke. And from what I understand, you know, my research led me to the idea that it comes from a Hawaiian word that means to cut crosswise. So I was just wondering what you guys know about this. You know, it seems so odd that it’s such a, you know, specific, that there’s a word for such a specific cut. And I was just wondering what you guys know about it, if that’s in fact true or, you know, what you know.

Oh, interesting.

Well, I don’t know much about Hawaiian, but there sure are a lot of words that derive from cutting. Mozzarella, the cheese, is named for, it comes from an Italian word for cut. And feta cheese is also from a Greek word that means cut, schnitzel.

Interesting.

Wow. In German, skrad, the word skrad.

As in the fish?

Yeah, the fish. It comes from a Dutch word that means to slice.

Does schnitzel mean like a cutlet? Is it like to cut like a cutlet?

It comes from the German schneiden, which means to cut. It’s related to the name Schneider, which is literally like tailor in English.

Yeah, so it’s sliced. And I was going to say one other that comes to mind is dal, you know, the pea dish from India. I mean, if you really, well, I was going to say if you split hairs, but it comes from a Sanskrit word, ultimately, that means split because those legumes are split.

Interesting.

Isn’t that cool? And now the Hawaiian word we’re talking about here, to go back to the fish dish, is P-O-K-E, pronounced basically as poke, although in the mouths of Anglophones, it usually comes out as pokey or poke.

Poke.

I have seen it have an accent on the E, but that is incorrect. I think people are being influenced by Pokemon, but poke. And if you do look in all the Hawaiian dictionaries, I have like five of them. You will find that generally the word poke means to cut or to slice either fish or wood or other things. And there’s a variety of different longer two word phrases that have to do with slicing octopus and some other things. So it’s consistently been chronicled.

But what really is interesting to me is how this left Hawaii and what happened to poke really mirrors the way that words themselves travel even when they’re not food words. I don’t know what you uncovered when you were writing, but did you happen to see what Rachel Lawden wrote in her book, The Food of Paradise? It’s about Hawaiian cuisine.

I did. I think that’s where I got the etymology. And yeah, it was really interesting. She really did a great job tracing the history of it. There’s one paragraph that I think really lays out how surprising this is. She says, neither the most extensive study of Hawaiian uses fish nor the first ethnic cookbook mentions poke as a fish dish, nor does the definition or the definitive Hawaiian dictionary nor the major glossary of pigeon. But what she says is, recipes labeled poke, with P-O-K-E, do not occur in cookbooks published before the mid-1970s, and locals who left for the mainland in the 1960s returned to the island and are surprised to find the dish that they do not remember ever having had before.

So what we’re looking at here is a dish that just kind of popped up in the 1970s. Surely they ate fish before. Surely they sliced it up. But this particular kind of fish salad with seaweed and other things thrown in there was a relatively new creation, say the last 50-ish years or so.

Fascinating.

Yeah.

So cool.

So I love what you just said, though, about how it mirrors what happens to language.

Mm—

Mm—

Yeah, we find again and again that, like, why are there all those pokey restaurants now? Was there a conference? Did everyone get together and decide this was a thing? How was this idea spread? Maybe there’s something that could get to the bottom of it. Generally, it describes to me the same way that a slang word appears. And everyone starts saying something is lit. And you’re like, don’t know why that caught on. Don’t know how that caught on. All I know is that it caught on.

You know what? We probably could do a whole week of stuff like this. I’ve got to say, Leslie, you have to call us again when you’ve got another food-language intersection. It’s our sweet spot.

I absolutely will.

Or just come on over to San Diego.

Yeah. We’ll chat all the pokey restaurants one after the other.

Thank you so much for calling. Really appreciate it.

Thank you, guys. That was really fun. Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Bye.

Well, there’s lots to say about language and food, and we’d love to talk with you about it. So call us 877-929-9673 or send your thoughts in email to words@waywordradio.org.