Ha‘uke‘uke:

Ha‘uke‘uke on the rocks near the old wharf, Kawaihae. "You’ve got to get it where there are rocks, where there is a rocky area," Jeannine explains.

"Ha‘uke‘uke, it clings to the rocks close to the shore," Jeannine says. "And it’s a type of urchin, but the sea urchin is under water. This one is purple. When there is a certain flower blooming, I don’t know what the name of that flower is, but I know we’ll be driving and my husband will say, ‘ha‘uke‘uke is fat. We got to go harvest.’ He’ll pass that flower. And I’m like ‘oh, go get some! Go get some!’"

"You see that yellow part?" Jeannine asks, "It’s like caviar, I think."

 

"You have to crack it with something very hard, and he cracks it in half with the back of a cleaver. And then the inside is yellow, it’s like sea urchin. Of course he cleans it for us, and he puts it in the bowl, and he puts chili pepper, he puts a little water and vinegar, I don’t know what else he, I’ve tried to do it like him, I can’t. And he marinates it. And then, so what I do is I,with a spoon I’ll dig it out and I’ll just eat all of that. It must be very fattening.

"And it’s really gross to look at it. My husband says I’m a real scavenger because I’ll eat these. I can’t help it, I was brought up this way. Those people on the East Coast are going to say, ‘They eat that? They’re cannibals!’"

Pacific Worlds > Hawai‘i: Kawaihae > The Sea > Seaside