These days, you may find yourself looking back and longing for simpler times.

Christmas parties in the garage when all the neighbors brought homemade food and the buffet table sagged under the weight of Jell-O molds, nishime and seven different variations of potato salad.

Birthday parties at the beach park pavilion with Aunty’s special boiled peanuts, nori chicken and cone sushi that tasted extra good when you were sunburned and waterlogged from swimming all day.

Community meetings and PTA nights when people came not to fight, but to have a meal together; when you could tell who was in attendance just by looking for their family specialty on the food table. Ooh! The pancit with extra shrimp is here! Kathy’s family came! 

At the beginning of the pandemic when the lockdowns started, Jennifer Hasegawa was feeling anxious and disconnected, as we all were. Far away from the Hilo community where she grew up, Hasegawa looked around her San Francisco apartment for some sort of comfort or inspiration. Her gaze landed on an old red cookbook held together with a rubber band, “More of Our Favorite Recipes” published in 1964 by the Maui Home Demonstration Council. Those recipes represented Hawaii to her. It represented family and community and a sense of well-being.

“I remembered that I’d meant to scan the book before the book eventually disintegrated into powder. And I thought, maybe I should scan it and put it online somewhere,” Hasegawa said. “I wondered if anyone else even cared about these books or if it was just me.”

She reached out to a group of friends she met in high school — Kris Kaneshiro Stanton, Michelle Saito and Joy Nishie. They had been on the Hawaiʻi State Student Council together, a leadership program for civic-minded teens. She asked her friends what they thought of her project. They loved the idea and they each had vintage cookbooks of their own that they wanted to share.

“The first book I added, the red book, I scanned on an old printer/flatbed scanner I had around the house. The printer was broken, but the scanner still worked — just barely.” Hasegawa said.

The website Hasegawa and her friends created, Kau Kau Chronicles, now has recipes from dozens of out-of-print Hawaiʻi cookbooks that were published by community groups, schools, and as office projects. The most visited cookbook is the oldest one, The Hilo Woman’s Club Cookbook, published in 1937. Hasegawa wasn’t sure anyone would be interested in old Hawaii recipes, but now the site gets around 50,000 visits a year with 176,000 page views.

Many of the recipes from the old books contain the name of the person who contributed the recipe, so the site serves as a kind of historical record of the “who’s who” of a particular time and place. This makes the content feel personal and special. It’s pretty exciting to find the recipe for a cake your relative used to bake with your relative’s name on it.

Anyone is welcome to contribute recipes or share a vintage cookbook. Directions for how to send in recipes are listed on the site. All it takes is a cell phone camera and an email address.

“From the start of the project, I tried to defy my usual perfectionist tendencies. Getting as many cookbooks preserved as quickly as possible is more important than all of the files being in the same format and with a minimum resolution,” Hasegawa said. “Having Aunty’s cascaron recipe in a slightly blurry JPG is better than not having it at all.”

One happy surprise the group discovered through their work is that the beloved collection of Honpa Hongwanji Hawaiʻi Betsuin cookbooks dating back to the 1970s are still available for sale. Instead of posting those recipes, there’s a link from the Kau Kau Chronicles site to purchase the books directly from the church.

“This is a strict rule we have, which is that if a cookbook is still being sold by the original publishing organization, we don’t share it because it is still a source of income for the organization,” Hasegawa said.

There is also a Kau Kau Chronicles Facebook Group with over 7,000 members where people share recipes and stories and help each other track down something they remember eating at a party long ago. It’s all very congenial and wholesome, something you don’t see much of on social media these days.

That commitment to good-natured sharing goes back to that old red cookbook and the feelings it inspired. It was part of a collection of recipe books that chronicled an abiding aloha in the community that seemed much more present generations ago.

“I think they are the first books that managed to really capture the recipes of a golden age of food in Hawaiʻi,” Hasegawa said. “The recipes are half foods from ‘the old country’ and half foods from ‘the new country.’ You can see recipes for nishime, lau lau, vinha D’alhos, kau yuk and cascaron right alongside recipes for Swedish meatballs, French dressing, beef stroganoff and sauerbraten. I love seeing this juxtaposition.

“For me, these cookbooks are awesome because in the same way ‘Pidgin to Da Max’ made people proud of our local language, it made people proud of their local food. It gave us permission to say: this doesn’t need to come from Le Cordon Bleu to be delicious or meaningful.”