I've spent the past few weeks in another century — another couple of centuries, actually.

And I've learned a lot. I know how to give a poi supper. I know the name of the first local recipe to appear in The Advertiser (a guava confection). I know the names of the most popular grocery stores in Honolulu in the 1930s (and they all delivered!), how Honolulu housewives dealt with meat rationing during the war years, and how Hawai'i learned to love lomi salmon, Saloon Pilot crackers and Spam.

I know all this because I've been researching a project we hope you'll enjoy as much as I have enjoyed creating it. It's a new cookbook, "The Island Plate: 150 Years of Recipes and Food Lore from The Honolulu Advertiser."

The book, which I'm still hard at work on, will be released by Island Heritage in late summer or early fall — shortly after the newspaper's official 150th anniversary (July 8, 2006) and just in time for the holiday giving season.

I've seen mockups of the finished chapters and of the cover, and I can't wait to see the finished product.

It really is like giving birth — shaping a vision for the book; researching information, recipes, advertisements and photographs in The Advertiser's files and elsewhere; testing the recipes to be sure they'll work in today's kitchens; writing the essays that introduce the chapters and getting to know, over the distance of years, the journalists and home economists who provided generations of readers with food news.

"The Island Plate" will chronicle Island foodways from the cooking traditions of the kanaka maoli, with their steam and stone ovens, to the wok-seared 'ahi of today's celebrity chefs. And of course the book will include the most beloved and requested recipes of the past century and a half — including many of the school-kine, Mom-kine recipes we share in this column. All the recipes in the book originally appeared in The Advertiser, and all have been tested before use. Some previously appeared in Advertiser-published cookbooks that are now out of print and almost impossible to find.

The 150-page, hardcover, spiral-bound book will sell for $19.99 upon release. But now through July 8, our marketing department will take preorders at a discounted price of $14.99.

Go to this page to order: http://shop.honoluluadvertiser.com/category.asp?categoryID=471

You can also check Page B6 of today's newspaper for an order form (coupons will continue to appear in the newspaper through the ordering period).

If you order and pick up the book at the Advertiser information desk, you save shipping and handling fees.

If you have got questions, call our information desk at 525-7620. Please don't call me — I'm rushing to finish the book!

Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.