Papaya Seed Dressing

Hawaii's sweet and sharp salad dressing, ripe papaya and its own peppery black seeds blended with onion, vinegar, and oil into a speckled cream

Origin: Honolulu & the Hawaiian Islands

From the journey of Papaya.

Papaya is the fruit Hawaii is best known for growing, and it is not a long-standing one. Seed reached the islands in the early nineteenth century, credited variously to the Spanish adviser Francisco de Paula Marín, who is said to have brought it from the Marquesas, and to ships out of the Caribbean. The decisive arrival is dated precisely: on 7 October 1911 Gerrit P. Wilder of Honolulu introduced seed from Barbados, and the small single-portion fruit it produced was named Solo in 1919, after the fact that one person finishes one at a sitting. The Kapoho selection of the 1950s, grown on the lava soils of Puna, made the export trade. It nearly ended. Papaya ringspot virus reached Puna in the 1990s and cut the crop to a fraction of itself. A team led by the plant pathologist Dennis Gonsalves, a Hawaii-born scientist whose family had farmed in Kohala, engineered resistance by inserting a gene for the virus's own coat protein into the plant, and the resulting varieties, SunUp and Rainbow, were released to growers in 1998. Most Hawaiian papaya has been transgenic ever since, which makes it one of the very few staple fruits in the world whose survival in a place is owed to a specific piece of laboratory work. The dressing is the local answer to what to do with the seeds. They taste of mustard and watercress, sharply so, and blended whole into a sweet and sour dressing they break into black flecks that pepper it. Who first made it is not recorded; it is in Hawaii cookbooks by the 1970s, it is bottled and sold in every supermarket in the islands, and it turns up at every buffet, over a salad of leaves, tomato, and more papaya.

Ingredients

150 g ripe papaya flesh, cubed
2 tbsp fresh papaya seeds, rinsed of their membrane
60 ml cider or rice vinegar
50 g granulated sugar
0.5 small onion, roughly chopped
1 tsp English mustard powder
1 tsp salt
200 ml neutral oil, such as groundnut or sunflower

Method

Blend the papaya flesh, vinegar, sugar, onion, mustard powder, and salt until smooth.
With the blender running, pour in the oil in a slow thread until the dressing thickens and turns pale.
Add the seeds and pulse three or four times only, until they are cracked into black specks the size of coarse pepper.
Chill for an hour and shake before using, over green leaves with tomato, avocado, and cubes of ripe papaya.

Notes

Use the seeds from the same fruit as the flesh; they lose their heat within a day or two of the papaya being cut. The sharpness comes from benzyl isothiocyanate, the compound that puts the bite into mustard and cress.

The Gastrographer

Name: Papaya Seed Dressing
Prep time: 10 min
Total time: 10 min
Yield: 8
Cuisine: Honolulu & the Hawaiian Islands
Ingredients: 150 g ripe papaya flesh, cubed; 2 tbsp fresh papaya seeds, rinsed of their membrane; 60 ml cider or rice vinegar; 50 g granulated sugar; 0.5 small onion, roughly chopped; 1 tsp English mustard powder; 1 tsp salt; 200 ml neutral oil, such as groundnut or sunflower

Mapping Culinary History

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Journey Point Map Key

Ingredient originTrade or transit route

Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control