Some dishes carry their recipe inside their name. In Hawaiian, poke means to cut crosswise. Fishermen cut neat cubes from the day’s catch, tossed them with sea salt, with limu seaweed, with inamona made from roasted kukui nuts, and shared the bowl on deck while the nets came in. No plating, no recipe book; whatever the sea had given.

What shaped the dish into its present form is the islands’ history of migration. Japanese laborers arriving at the sugar plantations late in the nineteenth century brought soy sauce and sesame oil; shoyu slowly took the place of salt. The poke we know is the marriage of Polynesia’s open-sea inheritance and Japan’s kitchen memory. Its journey around the world is recent history; after the 2010s, poke left Honolulu and found a counter on every continent.

In our bowl the lead role goes to salmon: silken orange cubes, warm rice, avocado, crisp vegetables, sesame. Salmon’s acquaintance with poke is young as well; but some acquaintances get along too well for anyone to ask their age.

The voyage of a deck meal: from salt to shoyu, from the Pacific to the Mediterranean.