Muriel Miura: Trailblazer of Hawai’i Regional Cuisine

By jennifer hasegawa

Author of nearly 30 cookbooks and host of two of the first TV shows focused on local Hawaiʻi and Japanese cooking, Muriel Miura Kaminaka was also a multiple award-winning home economist and a passionate educator to Hawaiʻi’s youth, home cooks, and aspiring chefs, including Sam Choy and Alan Wong.

“Mom assumed cooking meals for the family when she was in middle school,” said Ling, based on stories conveyed by Muriel’s cousin Pamela. “It’s just what you do, and you become efficient.” 

Muriel’s beginnings as a cook in the family kitchen soon branched out to include experience at her family’s business. She started helping in the kitchen of Hananoya, a tea house her father ran on Vineyard Street in Honolulu, which was host to wedding receptions and social and civic club meetings.

“I remember family gatherings at the tea house,” recalled Ling. “Rows and rows of shoes and slippers neatly placed at the entrance to the teahouse room. The floors were lined with tatami mats. I can remember the smell of straw. We all sat on the floor. Tables were low and stretched the length of the rooms. The food was beautiful and plentiful. I also remember the tea house songs, and my mom objecting to my knowing them!”

Getting an education and seeing the world

When it came time for Muriel to apply to college, she was asked to pick a major. She gravitated toward home economics and asked a school counselor what it entailed. “Cooking and sewing,” they said. “I can do that!” Muriel declared.

While others around her might have recognized her talents in these areas sooner, Muriel hadn’t yet realized that these activities would become her career.

Muriel majored in Home Economics at the University of Hawaiʻi and went on to get her fifth-year teaching certificate. 

During her studies, she won the 1956 Dole Summer Travel Award, which sent her on a month-long trip from Hawaiʻi to Washington DC, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to experience the culinary industry through travel. The trip included attending the American Home Economics Association convention in Washington DC.

In the late 1950s, Muriel married Walter Miura, becoming Muriel Miura and taking on the name that would adorn dozens of cookbooks dear to the people of Hawaiʻi.

Together, Muriel and Walter headed to New York, where Muriel pursued a master’s degree in Home Economics Education with a focus on textiles and clothing at Columbia University in New York. She then continued her studies at Columbia and earned her advanced degree in Education.

“To this day, I don’t know if Walter followed Muriel or Muriel followed Walter to New York,” mused Ling. “As she was pursuing her studies at Columbia, he was studying Marketing at NYU for an MBA. According to my mom, she learned so much about business by helping dad on his projects. So, in my opinion, she is deserving of an honorary MBA!”

I asked Ling what she thought about her mother’s pursuit of multiple advanced degrees on the Mainland, at that time in history, and as a Japanese-American woman from Hawaiʻi. “Mom was the perfect combination of brilliance, pragmatism, ingenuity, and tireless dedication. I think things were more challenging for her than I ever realized. A faded photo of a small Christmas tree decorated with egg shells she had painted by hand was an example.” 

Upon completing their degrees, Muriel returned to Hawaiʻi, ready to start her professional life.

Teaching in Hawaiʻi’s schools

Muriel returned to Hawaiʻi with aspirations of teaching. She began her professional life as a schoolteacher in the Hawaiʻi public school system, teaching home economics at Waipahu High School and Waimanalo Intermediate School.

As she spent time in the schools teaching young people how to cook, Muriel had the chance to strike up friendships with many school cafeteria workers. She consulted with and learned from these professionals, working to serve healthy and tasty meals to Hawaiʻi’s schoolchildren while also cooking at scale.

Muriel also taught in Hawaiʻi community colleges, and this is where she would meet and teach students Sam Choy and Alan Wong, who would, along with a dozen other chefs, go on to popularize what is now known as Hawaiʻi Regional Cuisine.

Chef and restauranteur Alan Wong has said of Muriel, “She’s brutally honest. She would tell you like it was.” He commented that in doing this, Muriel forced them to up their game.

Bringing her expertise to The Gas Company

Muriel’s first job as a home economist was with The Gas Company, formerly the Honolulu Gas Company. She joined the company in 1961 as a part-time employee, became an assistant director a year later, and six months later became director of home services. Muriel was one of the first Hawaiʻi locals to achieve a top position at the company.

Why The Gas Company? To set some historical context, at the time, it was common practice for gas and electric companies to hire home economists to develop programs to teach customers how to use gas and electric appliances. This program provided a valuable free service to communities, while also promoting gas and electricity use in a meaningful way. 

It may be difficult to imagine, but the people Muriel and her colleagues taught to cook included a generation who may have grown up in Hawaiʻi homes with no electricity and a refrigerator called an “ice box,” which was literally a box with a big block of ice in it. While having been on the market for a few decades, these modern appliances could still have felt like a newer form of technology to some homemakers.

At The Gas Company, Muriel planned and coordinated regional and national conferences while also working in sales, marketing, and customer relations.

As a part of these efforts, she taught “Wiki-Wiki Kau Kau” lunchtime cooking classes to homemakers and working women on the first Tuesday and Friday of each month at The Gas Company’s test kitchen, located in the Sky Lanai penthouse in downtown Honolulu.

Muriel also developed numerous educational pamphlets and videos. “She created the Blue Flame Notebook pamphlets teaching people how to cook with gas, how to cook in general,” said Ling. “They became so popular that she put them into a cookbook, and one cookbook led to another.” 

These Blue Flame Notebook pamphlets were just one of the catalysts that launched Muriel’s career as a cookbook author and cooking show host. Nearly 50 years later, these pamphlets are still highly sought after and considered collectibles.

While working for The Gas Company, Muriel earned multiple honors, including winning the McCall’s Magazine Home Service Achievement Award twice. 

She also won the prestigious Festival of Gas Award for her outstanding demonstration in the Festival of Gas at the New York World’s Fair. 

Muriel gave five cooking demonstrations a day at the fair, featuring creative uses for foods from Hawaiʻi, including fresh pineapples and coconut milk. Muriel wore mu’u mu’us and fresh flower leis, which were the source of much interest and admiration at the demonstrations.

But of course, there were challenges at The Gas Company along the way as well, including bumping up against the “glass ceiling,” which sadly still impacts the working lives of women today.

“I remember her deciding to retire early when her male peers were being promoted to VP of this or that,” said Ling of her mother’s career at The Gas Company. “I think she didn’t receive opportunities to be promoted to that level despite her clear qualifications. One of her early ‘supervisors’ was a nice man who, as he explained to me recently, was told by Muriel that he was an incompetent manager. Of course, I asked him ‘Was she right?’ and he admitted that he learned to be better because of her frankness. I appreciate that he came to my mom’s services to pay his respects.”

Reaching wider audiences

As Muriel further honed her expertise and vision, coming into her own as a pioneering home economist, it became clear that her guidance needed to reach a wider audience beyond her already popular pamphlets and live cooking demos.

While Muriel kept working for The Gas Company for 33 years, she combined her skills as a home economist, educator, and entrepreneur to develop other outlets that could allow her work to reach more people.

Author of 26 cookbooks

Muriel’s journey as a cookbook author began with her compiling the recipes she developed for the Blue Flame Notebook pamphlets into a cookbook. The first edition of “Cook Japanese: Hawaiian Style,” self-published in 1974, was a modest paperback selling for $3.95 with hand-drawn illustrations by her friend and Leilehua High School art teacher, Paul Konishi. 

In a November 1974 article in The Honolulu Advertiser, Muriel said, “The art of good cooking has little to do with wealth, fame, age or country… Good Japanese cooking requires a spirit of adventure, an artistic eye and imagination.” 

Muriel claimed that everything she knew about Japanese food she learned from her parents. Deftly connecting the past to the future, Muriel said she wrote Cook Japanese Hawaiian Style for her daughter Shari. Muriel wanted to do all she could to introduce a new generation to home-style Japanese cooking because she knew these recipes and skills were already being lost by her own generation.

“I learned to cook from her books,” said Ling. “They were that clear and simple. The book sold out 8 or 9 printings, maybe 100,000 copies? Those books were our bread and butter for a while. Imagine this - my Mom driving boxes of books in her car trunk to stores and vendors for sale…just another example of her determination.”

This was just the beginning of Muriel’s prolific and long-running career as a cookbook author, publishing 26 cookbooks, with the most recent one, Muriel Miura’s Home Cooking Hawaiʻi-Style: Island Comfort Food at Its Best, published posthumously in October 2021 by her long-time publisher Mutual Publishing.

I asked Ling if she remembers her mother working on all of these cookbooks while she was growing up. Ling said, “Actually, I have no recollection of this. I was surprised to find all of her folders and recipes. [For her,] work was work, and home was home.”

Muriel developed many of the recipes for her cookbooks in The Gas Company test kitchens but also curated recipes from her community. In fact, as a part of developing “What Hawaiʻi Likes to Eat,” published in 2007, Muriel and her dear friend and co-author Betty Shimabukuro surveyed the public through a local newspaper to learn, in fact, what Hawaiʻi actually likes to eat.

In this book, we see Muriel not only as a recipe developer for the people and a cookbook author but as a documentarian of the food preferences of a people and a place at a specific moment in history. Long before Web 2.0 and Instagrammable moments, Muriel was looking for ways to engage with her audience and give them what they wanted.

Nearly 20 years later, in reviewing this cookbook, we can see how some of these trends solidified into the bedrock of Hawaiʻi food culture. In these pages, we have recipes for Loco Moco and Squid Luau alongside recipes for Lobster Thermidor and Filet Mignon with Black Bean Sauce, conveying a snapshot of something that is still true to this day: “This is Hawai’i – a melting pot, as the cliche goes, for all cultures, and by extension, for all flavors.” (from the introduction to “What Hawaiʻi Likes to Eat”)

Hosting and appearing on numerous TV shows

In the same way that her work on Blue Flame Notebooks enabled an expansion to cookbooks, Muriel’s live cooking demonstrations for The Gas Company provided the basis for her first TV show, “Cook Japanese,” which aired on Hawaiʻi Public Television starting in 1973. The show was one of the most popular programs ever aired on the channel.

This show led to yet another TV show, “The New World of Cooking with Muriel,” airing in 1979 in Hawaiʻi and on the Mainland. 

“I believe she enjoyed teaching, and television gave her a broader audience,” said Ling. “I’m viewing the tapes in her collection for the first time!”

As a part of her work at The Gas Company, Muriel hosted Julia Child when Child visited Hawaiʻi.

In addition to hosting her own TV shows, Muriel also made countless appearances as a guest on other shows, such as “Hari’s Kitchen,” with her dear friend Hari Kojima. Kojima was well-known for his series of TV shows, including “Let’s Go Fishing,” which ran for 17 years, teaching Hawaii viewers how to fish, cut fish, and cook fish in a uniquely local way.

Recipe testing was an integral part of Muriel’s methodology. She tested her recipes, ensuring that people would be able to use them to cook what she demonstrated and get the same results in their homes. 

Ling said of her mom’s recipes, “They’re genuine, they’re real. She wouldn’t hold anything back. There is an ethical principle behind these recipes and cookbooks. They are more than just style.”

According to Ling, Muriel rigorously pre-planned everything for her TV series. She had the newspapers print the agenda for each show ahead of time, informing readers of the recipes she’d be demonstrating that week and providing a list of the ingredients they’d need to cook along with her.

“I don’t know of any other cooking shows that genuinely teach rather than simply entertain the audience,” observed Ling.

I asked Ling about her mom’s pioneering spirit, bringing her skills as a cook and educator to cookbooks and TV decades before the Food Network and today’s foodie culture.

“Mom was definitely a pioneer, but a very practical one,” she said. “No fuss. It was not a sign of weakness to take a cooking shortcut here or there.”

In an article in The Honolulu Advertiser from November 2006, Muriel shared, “I am very pragmatic. I remember being criticized for using canned goods or cake mixes, but why should I start from scratch if I can do something that comes out pretty decent in a shorter period of time? I was thinking of the working person, like me. Traditional Japanese cooking is very tedious…my premise was always to make it attainable.”

And this pragmatic approach to delicious cooking is what created so many fans of her work at The Gas Co, as a cookbook author, and as a cooking show host and guest.

Getting personal - In the public light

Considering Muriel’s vast public footprint through live demos, cookbooks, and TV appearances, I asked Ling about her mother’s role as a public figure.

“Public attention is a bit of a curse. People would come up to her for an autograph, to ask for recipes, all sorts of requests and all while standing in line at a grocery store or post office. I vividly remember one woman coming to all of her classes and then starting to accuse her of stealing her clothing! So, as you will notice, mom’s book dedications don’t give our full names. Likewise, I was her ‘prep help’ on tour, cutting veggies and so forth while in the background out of view of the audience. She would thank her ‘prep help’ and not mention my name.” 

Entrepreneurial spirit

I also asked Ling about her mother’s entrepreneurial spirit, which is evident in her long list of accomplishments in her professional life and service to her community. I theorized that it might have come from her father, who started the family’s tea house. “In part, yes,” said Ling, “I think her entrepreneurship was more fueled by her survival instinct as a single mom, paying the mortgage, utilities, and the private school tuitions.”

Favorite meals

With all of the dishes Muriel developed and prepared, what was her favorite dish to make? 

“Hands down, beef stew,” said Ling. “She took two days to make it right, and have it ready for our homecoming meal. My son commented that you need to be a grandma to make stew the right way—takes time and love.”

“We had Sunday family meals, every Sunday, no exceptions,” Ling continued. “We gathered at my grandfather and grandmother’s home. Mom would spend all morning preparing most of the meal, and cart it all up to their home. My grandfather had prepared the namasu, and would cook tempura as soon as we arrived. My grandmother would occasionally prepare tai, broiled with mayo, of course, or chicken nishime. Imagine Thanksgiving weekly, what a luxury!”

Muriel also loved having long luncheons with her friends, from local high-end restaurants to Zippy’s, a casual restaurant chain serving classic local Hawaiʻi favorites, such as saimin and their famous chili.  “Although I wasn’t there, I am certain that the time with her friends was her main nourishment - the food served was a side dish. She is missed,” shared Ling. 

Life with Yoshio

In the 1980s, Muriel married her second husband, Yoshio Kaminaka, a strong supporter of the Honolulu restaurant community through his career in restaurant supply sales.  

“He was such a kind person. They met through the Hawaiʻi ‘food network’ and went on many adventures together.”

Pioneering vision

Muriel devoted her life to her community and serving as an educator, living out her father’s advice:

“You do what you can do to make people’s lives better. Make things better for the next generation.” 

Energy conservation and sustainable seafood

In her cooking classes, Muriel promoted energy efficiency and conservation. 

“She timed her meal preps so that they required less energy,” said Ling. 

Muriel also worked with the fish and game industry to promote the use of sustainable seafood over land-based creatures for food as seafood is more carbon-efficient.

Giving kids choices

Always mindful of her father’s guidance to work to make things better for the next generation, Muriel advocated for home economics and culinary arts education as a way to provide meaningful and sustainable careers for Hawaiʻi’s youth. 

She saw that people in Hawaiʻi started cooking very young and that learning culinary skills commonly started in high school. Muriel believed in and supported these high school programs.

“If not for these programs, the lives of some students could have gone a very different way,” said Ling.

“My mom believed in giving kids choices. This is why she was such a prolific educator.”

Creating community and supporting Mōʻiliʻili

Muriel was a member of national organizations, helping to shape policies and standards around food service and consumption, including the American Family and Consumer Science Association, the American School Food Service Association, and the Hawaiʻi Hotel and Restaurant Association.

She also devoted time to local organizations, including the Mōʻiliʻili Community Center, the Japanese Women’s Society of Honolulu, the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaiʻi, and Soroptimist International of Waikiki. 

“Mom embraced different cuisines and the importance of community,” said Ling.

Mōʻiliʻili held a special place in Muriel’s heart as she spent some time growing up in this Honolulu neighborhood. Her family built and owned the Kamada Building, one of the oldest commercial buildings in the neighborhood, which housed a small grocery store run by her father. 

From this neighborhood store, Muriel had a grassroots view of the community, which would become one of the last Japanese communities in Hawaiʻi. As of the 1930 U.S. Census, 80% of Mōʻiliʻili’s population was of Japanese origin. 

When the development of the H-1 freeway took commercial traffic away from businesses in Mōʻiliʻili, Muriel and Elaine Costello started the “Discover Mōʻiliʻili Festival” in 1996 to help bring business and community resources back to the neighborhood. The festival has since evolved into the Mōʻiliʻili Summer Fest.

Muriel also worked to create the “The Tastes and Tales of Mōʻiliʻili” cookbook, published in 1997 as a fundraiser to benefit the Mōʻiliʻili Community Center.

An enduring legacy of excellence and delicious food

“Mom was such a giving person,” said Ling, “But also brutally honest and rigorous about how she expected things to happen.”

Betty Shimabukuro, Muriel’s long-time friend and collaborator, captured it well,

“Common sense and it-better-be-good sense of quality were the trademarks of Muriel’s career in teaching others to cook.”

In an interview announcing her book “A Japanese Kitchen: Traditional Recipes with an Island Twist,” Muriel said that she wanted the book to contribute “in my small way” to the legacy of the Japanese in Hawaiʻi and to pass on family traditions to her grandchildren. 

Her wish was for her readers to cook from her book with their own two hands and then sit down with their families to eat together, unplugged, the way she remembers sharing meals and conversation with her family.

“My mom believed that the greatest gift is a gift of yourself: Your time, your talent, and your consideration for others and what brings them joy.”

Even in her final days, Muriel’s passion for sharing recipes and culinary techniques and history never wavered. She was working on yet another book, “Yum Yum Cha: Let’s Eat Dim Sum in Hawaiʼi.” Bennett Hymer, Muriel’s publisher at Mutual Publishing, enlisted the expertise of fellow cookbook author Lynette Lo Tom to help finish the book Muriel started. The cookbook was published posthumously just a few months after Muriel’s passing. 

And there might be more to come from the mind of Muriel Miura. “One final wish that she had not yet realized is a compilation of recipes gathered from her friends, the cafeteria managers of Hawaiʼi, nourishing future generations,” shared Ling. Having had a chance to explore the strength of Muriel’s goodwill and spirit, I would not be surprised to see this book come to fruition. 

As I reflect on the vast and generous life and achievements of Muriel Kamada Miura Kaminaka, I feel such deep gratitude, awe, and respect. Her multitude of efforts in education, community-making, and the preservation of culinary arts will continue to inspire feelings of pride and joy for generations to come.

For more information about Zentoku, click here.