Island Cooking: The Fantasy & The Reality : The cult of the tropics used to be rum drinks and pupu platers; now it’s broiled lobster with fried leeks.

For generations, Americans have sighed for tropics, where all you ever have to do (so goes the story) is reach up from your hammock once in a while and grab a papaya.

Basically, the cult of the tropics reeks of the fantasies of people in cold climates: easy manners, outdoor living, no snow to shovel. In a way it’s just a sweatier version of the usual Snow Belters’ fantasy of California. It seems strange that it ever had a hold on Californians themselves, but it certainly did. Maybe it goes back to the Twenties, when Margaret Meade was advertising Polynesia as a sexual paradise and everybody was playing the ukulele and learning a dance called the hula-hula.

In the ‘40s and ‘50s the cult of the tropics spawned a thing called Polynesian Cuisine, which was by nature sweet, alcoholic and served aflame: a mixture of Cantonese appetizers, vaguely Indonesian entrees involving pineapple and coconut, and savage rum drinks with names like Missionary’s Downfall. The cuisine has fallen into disrepute now, along with the idea of serving drinks with little paper parasols in them, but for years Trader Vic’s, Don the Beachcomber’s and their imitations were considered exceptionally classy places to dine.

These days, the Tropics seem to have returned as a restaurant motif. Air travel has made people a little too sophisticated for the old Polynesian Cuisine so the new version stresses “light fresh flavors,” but this is still not quite the real story either.

In reality, the people of the Tropics tend to eat starchy food, both because of their poverty and because of the hard work they do. It’s not dull food, but also not at all what you’d call light. There is some truth to the vision of tropical cuisine full of exotic fruits and spices: In the Caribbean they often use curry spices. On the other hand, Polynesia knew of no spices at all before the 18th Century and is still cautious about using them. And as for fruits, Polynesia never saw the pineapple, mango or papaya until the 19th Century.

Alas for the pupu platter, the flaming rum drinks and the vision of a little grass shack. Today we know the reality of tropical cuisine. Fortunately, it’s more interesting than the fiction.

THE RECIPES: H10