Trader Vic’s Hawaiian ham and eggs
Vic Bergeron is one of my cooking heroes, up there with Len Deighton, Peter-Russell Clarke and Don Dunstan. He’s best known for inventing the Mai Tai cocktail and for his Trader Vic’s restaurants.
He was a pioneer of nouveau Polynesian cuisine and tiki culture. Frequently dismissed as a lowbrow purveyor of novelty and exotica (nowadays he’d be lauded for his fusion cooking style), he played up to the image in life and in his writings:
‘So if you’re going to be a purist and stick just to exactly the way the book says and never try anything else, why don’t you just go shoot yourself?’
His books are fun, laugh-aloud reads, aimed directly at a male audience. The Trader Vic’s Helluva Man’s Cookbook begins with a chapter on cooking meat. Later on he writes: ‘If you don’t eat vegetables, you’ll die. So you might as well cook ‘em so they taste good and then enjoy them’.
Here’s Trader Vic’s recipe for Hawaiian ham and eggs, in his own words:
Hawaiian Ham and Eggs
I’ve put this recipe into every cookbook I’ve written, I guess; it’s such a great dish! Here is the story.
My dad was an old French-Canadian and a helluva cook. On Sunday mornings before he opened his little grocery store, he’d make breakfast for us–my mom, my brother, and me. Sometimes it’d be fried bananas and pineapple with ham and eggs.
Here’s how he’d do it for each serving. He’d start with a heavy skillet and medium heat. First, he’d fry a slice of canned pineapple in a little butter, and take it out and put it on a warm platter. Then he’d split a banana lengthwise, and he’d fry that in the same pan with lots more butter. That made juice, and the pineapple had made juice. So he’d fry the banana pretty thoroughly until nicely browned, and then flip it out smoothly onto the platter. Then he’d add more butter, and fry a thick center ham slice in that and then put the ham on the platter. When he had the ham fried, there was a lot more juice in the pan, and then he’d add more butter. Then he’d put eggs in there to fry, and it was just like poaching eggs in butter and juice. Season them with salt and pepper if you need to, and put them on the platter. That’s the best ham and eggs I’ve ever tasted.