“CRACK SEED” IS less a name than an imperative. In its broadest definition, it is a category of snack, beloved in Hawaii, in which fruit — plum, peach, apricot, cherry, mango, lemon — is dried and shriveled beyond recognition, salted and sugared, simmered in a broth of sweet medicinal herbs, then served wet or left to shrivel again. But crack seed also refers, more singularly, to preserved fruit in which the stone heart has been split and left embedded in the flesh, a touch of bitterness that makes the taste stronger, keener — a shock to the tongue.

Note that it is never “cracked” seed, but always present tense, like another island specialty: shave ice. This reflects the pidgin legacy of immigrants who came from Asia to work Hawaii’s sugar-cane plantations in the mid-19th century and had no time for the niceties of conjugation in their new language. There’s an immediacy to it; spoken out loud, “crack seed” sounds like what it is, the hard nut breaking under the teeth. In poetic terms, the name is a spondee, two syllables in a row that claim equal force, disrupting the lilt of ordinary speech, like a command or a shout: Shut up, no way, get out.

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The custom of eating preserved fruit was passed down by plantation workers from Zhongshan in the Pearl Delta of southern China, who started arriving in Hawaii — then a kingdom — as contract laborers in the mid-19th century. As of the 2010 census, the majority of the state’s population was of Asian ancestry; around 15 percent was at least part Chinese, three-quarters of whom can trace their family history back to those early émigrés. Transliterations and adaptations of Chinese words — some Cantonese, some from a Zhongshan dialect — are still used to describe crack seed: “Kam cho” signals an infusion of licorice; “see mui” is a catchall for dried fruit in general, although the original term refers specifically to the fruit of the Prunus mume tree, the drupe of which is commonly called a plum even though it’s closer botanically to an apricot, plucked before it’s ripe and bracingly sour. (In Japan, the same fruit is fermented to make umeboshi.)