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Concept
Spam musubi
Summary
Spam musubi is a snack and lunch food composed of a slice of grilled Spam sandwiched either in between or on top of a block of rice, wrapped together with nori in the tradition of Japanese onigiri.
Inexpensive and portable, Spam musubi are commonly found near cash registers in convenience stores or mom-and-pop shops all over Hawaii, Guam and Hawaiian Barbecue restaurants in the mainland United States. Musubi can be easily made with the right materials, and typically only uses spam, rice, some salt, nori and shoyu (soy sauce). In Hawaii, musubi made from homemade spam is served on catering trays at formal events by celebrity chefs such as Alan Wong at his exclusive restaurants.
Spam musubi is a form of musubi, which originally came to Hawaii from Japan. It was a popular item among the lunchboxes of Hawaiian plantation workers.
The origin of Spam musubi is disputed. Survivors of the Japanese American internment camps on the mainland of the United States claim to have invented the precursor to Spam musubi, when they placed seasoned slices of Spam on white rice in a baking pan. However, most origin stories focus on Spam's ubiquity in Hawaii during and in the aftermath of World War II. With few other options, the canned meat was incorporated into local cuisines wherever American troops were stationed. For example, South Korea's budae-jjigae, a stew of surplus U.S. military foods, included Spam. In the United Kingdom, where Spam was ubiquitous during the hardship of the post-War years, Spam acquired a stigma exemplified by the 1970 Monty Python sketch. Spam may not have been abandoned in the Pacific like it was in the U.K. simply because of the comparative economic deprivation experienced in the Pacific region.
The Honolulu Star-Bulletin said of Spam musubi in 2002 that "There is no definitive history for this aberration." Still, the newspaper relayed that a 2001 cookbook stated that the potential creator is Mitsuko Kaneshiro, who began selling them out of City Pharmacy on Pensacola Street in Honolulu and by the early 1980s was selling 500 handmade Spam musubi a day out of her own shop, Michan's Musubi.
Official source
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