Where Did Butter Mochi Come From?
Do you remember your first taste of butter mochi?
I remember mine. I was a child in my family’s kitchen in Hilo. My mother pulled a 9x13-inch metal pan out of the oven. It held a golden brown cake and smelled so good!
Now, after years of baking and eating, I’d say it smelled like browned butter, vanilla, and custard. But back then, it just smelled like we were about to eat something really ONO!
After cooling off for a bit, my mom cut into it and it wasn’t a cake, exactly. It was more like my two favorite things—yellow butter cake and chichi dango mochi—had merged into a dream food.
My mom said, “It’s bibingka. Butter mochi.”
Here’s the Butter Mochi recipe my mom used so many years ago, from the Gold cookbook, Our Golden Anniversary Favorite Recipes from the Maui Extension Homemakers.
Over the years, this baked good has become more and more popular in Hawaii, spawning amazing variations like coconut mochi, custard mochi, chocolate mochi, and even pumpkin mochi for Thanksgiving.
Today, many people with gluten allergies turn to these rice-flour based “cakes” as a delicious gluten-free alternative to wheat-based cakes, which may have contributed to the invention of mochi muffins and mochi donuts.
Most recently, I’ve seen a brownie/mochi hybrid, which I can’t wait to make for another blog post.
But back to the topic of this post—where did butter mochi come from?
🌺🌺🌺
The use of “mochi” in the name wrongly implies that it is Japanese in origin. While butter mochi has the texture of Japanese mochi because the primary ingredient is rice, or rice flour, the best clue to the roots of its true origins comes in one of the names my mom used for it: bibingka.
A decade ago, I was in Goa, India. I was looking for snacks to bring back to the states as omiyage, or souvenirs. My travel guide book recommended bebinca because they are made locally, vacuum-packed, and ready to travel.
I was immediately curious about Goan bebinca because of my childhood memory of bibingka in Hawaii. What would I find in the bebinca shop? I was beginning to doubt my childhood assumption that it was Filipino in origin. I started thinking that it might be Portuguese because both Goa and Hawaii have been strongly influenced by Portuguese culture.
After reading up a bit on the topic, it appears that a prevalent conclusion about the origins of bebinca is that it is an original Goan recipe that migrated to Portuguese colonies.
But how did it get to Hawaii?
Bebinca is particularly well-travelled; according to Cozinha de Goa, the dessert travelled to far-off Portuguese colonies, from Goa to Malaysia to Indonesia and the Philippines to Hawaii and the Pacific. Along the way, the recipe underwent tremendous changes. The Filipinos did away with the layers for bibingka, as did the Sri Lankans who call it bibikkan. Closer home, there are Mangalorean (bibique) and East Indian variations of the bebinca. Then there were the Goans themselves who took the recipe with them to Portuguese Africa, British East Africa and beyond.
Like so many other customs and elements of culture, the origins of foods are beautifully fluid and sometimes beyond the reaches of history and documentation. So, while we may never know the exact origin story of butter mochi and how it arrived in Hawaii, we can be thankful that it did and that we have documentation of the recipe in one of the cookbooks featured on this site.
Try making some today using this Butter Mochi recipe.