Toast Hawaii

In 1955 a West German television cook set a slice of buttered toast on the counter, laid cooked ham on it, capped the ham with a ring of canned pineapple, and covered the lot with sliced cheese. That is Toast Hawaii. The grill turns the cheese from pale yellow to blistered gold at the edges, and the pineapple underneath goes from cold syrup-wet fruit to something warm and faintly caramelized. A cocktail cherry dropped into the hole of the ring is the traditional finishing touch, a red dot on a gold surface, and it is the part children claim first.

The eating is a swing between sweet and salty with a crisp floor under it. The first cut breaks the toast edge with an audible crackle, and the hot pineapple releases a little juice that the ham takes up and the cheese slides over. Heat matters here: eaten at the table straight from the grill it is bright and sharp, and ten minutes later the cheese has set into a skin and the fruit has gone limp. The toast is buttered before it sees any topping, which gives the underside a thin fried crispness and keeps the pineapple's moisture from reaching the crumb too quickly.

The cheese is usually a mild sliced or processed one, which melts evenly and does not weep fat, and the ham is the plain boiled kind sold in thin rounds. Sweet paprika dusted over the top is a common finish, and some cooks add a dab of mustard or Worcestershire sauce under the ham for a sharper note. Fresh pineapple turns up in modern versions, where it runs less syrupy and brings more acidity. Draining the canned ring on a cloth before it goes on decides whether the bottom slice stays crisp or turns to paste.

For a generation of West German households the dish was a weekly fixture into the 1970s, a hot, cheap supper that needed only a grill and four cans and packets from the pantry. The name does the cultural work. Pineapple in a tin stood for distant islands in a decade when most Germans could not afford to travel, and a South Seas label on a plate of toast gave a Tuesday evening a small ration of the exotic. In the 1980s it moved to pubs, party cellars and bowling alley kitchens, where it was served on a small plate with a cocktail stick.

The dish has also survived as a joke it is happy to be in on. In 2014 the singer Alexander Marcus released a Hawaii Toast Song that collected well over ten million YouTube views, and food writers marked the toast's 60th birthday in 2015 with the same mixture of affection and teasing. Chefs including Tim Mälzer have offered upgraded versions with rye bread, Serrano ham and Manchego, and the original keeps outselling them in memory because the tinned-pineapple version is the one people grew up with.

Origin and history

Clemens Wilmenrod, born Carl Clemens Hahn in 1906, hosted one of the first cooking programs on West German television. It began on the NWDR in February 1953 under the title Bitte, in zehn Minuten zu Tisch, and ran for 185 episodes until 1964. His repertoire was theatrical and built from shop-bought goods, with names such as Arabisches Reiterfleisch and Päpstliches Huhn, and Toast Hawaii is the dish most often credited to him, with 1955 as the usual year. The cookbooks he published in 1954, 1956 and 1963 carried the same style of recipe.

The credit comes with hedges. Some accounts say Wilmenrod took the recipe from his former teacher and rival Hans Karl Adam. The American Grilled Spamwich, a ham-style canned-meat toast with cheese that Hormel printed in a 1939 recipe booklet, has been proposed as a model, and the French croque monsieur has been named as a precursor. None of these claims is settled, and the pineapple and ham pairing was already circulating in other forms by the 1950s.

What is documented is how fast the toast spread. By about 1960 it was on the menu at the airport restaurant in Zurich, one of the first places in Switzerland to serve it, and by the mid 1960s it had reached restaurants in East Germany. A dish first shown to viewers in 1955 had, within a decade, become a menu item in three countries.