Our family’s nut history goes back to 1918 and is fascinating with its many “firsts”.
My grandparents lived in Kukuihaele Plantation on the Big Island. The manager’s house still exists, and is registered as a National Historic Preservation. Granddaddy was manager there from 1916 - 1944. The plantation prospered under his care. He was a very innovative man, a chemist by education, and loved agricultural challenges. He had the idea to grow macadamia nut trees as a reforestation project, and as a secondary crop for areas where the land wasn’t suitable for cane. The plantation owners to agree to let him plant mac’ seedlings in the “rubbish” lava land close to foothills where sugar couldn’t be grown. He got the original seedlings from Australia in 1918.
It took seven years of babying and nurturing the young trees for him to get his first harvest. He would cull out the inferior trees after that. How he and Mother Nature played with the saplings! Some trunks would grow twisted or split, and he would wire them together just so the maturing tree could bear nuts, and he could decide to keep that one or not. Subsequent nut orchards were grown by the parent seednuts – by boring a hole in the fertile lava, the nut’s strong, persistent roots would break up the lava as it took hold & flourished.
He invented & patented (for the plantation) a macadamia whole-nut cracking device. The basic premise of his machine is still used today to crack these thick-shelled nuts. After a few years, it became apparent that they had a viable commodity there in Kukuihaele. Unfortunately, W.W.II intervened.
During those war years, my Mother and Tutu (grandmother) spent many hours in the plantation house kitchen experimenting with making chocolate covered macadamia nuts.
Granddaddy would get involved in the taste testing, too! That was a difficult time to produce such a luxury in quantity. Sugar and butter were rationed, but Tutu and Mom would barter things for their friends and neighbor’s rations of butter and sugar! Several chocolate brands were experimented with – from Pennsylvania’s Hershey, San Francisco’s Giradelli, and Nestle’s. Swiss chocolate supply lines were too unstable during the war to even entertain. My Mom will remember whom they eventually chose. A dinner fork with the inner tines turned back was their candy fork for lifting the confections!
Mom came from Ithaca, New York, and was quite skilled in candy making. Both of these women loved chocolate – but Tutu preferred the dark while Mom preferred the milk chocolate. Their compromise was to produce a box of half-dark and half-light chocolate! They loved nuts, too, so they decided they wanted to use the whole macadamia nut. They placed three whole nuts in a row and poured a coating of chocolate over them. A box of their chocolate-covered macadamia nuts consisted of half-light and half-dark candies, each 3-nut candy nestled in a little brown paper pleated cup. Granddad also invented a candy box-folding device for their luscious results.
Gasoline was also rationed. Of course gasoline didn’t go into the recipe, but it was necessary to transport the candies all the way along the windy Hamakua coast road to the Hilo Drugstore, which sold their candies under the triangle plantation name. My Mom would make the delivery – a long drive, often resulting in returning to Kukuihaele after dark, the road curves poorly illuminated by her vehicles blackout light slits. Because of curfew and blackout, the countryside was pitch black with no friendly lights in homes along the lonely way.
THIS then was the inception of commercial macadamia nuts and chocolate covered macadamia nuts. There are various old newspaper and magazine articles about it.
Your mom invented the chocolate coated macadamia!
