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When he was growing up in a French-speaking Creole family in Louisiana, the Thanksgiving meal seemed endless, segueing from gumbo to roast duck to turkey with oyster, shrimp and crab meat stuffing, to stewed wild rabbit, to stuffed mirliton squash, to redfish.

Levi Raines, the chef de cuisine at Bywater American Bistro, which opened last spring, developed an oyster gravy that is essentially gumbo by another name: a creamy purée of poached oysters and grated mirliton squash served over jasmine rice with fried jerk-spiced oysters.

Instead of shepherdesses, the traditional mirliton dance is taken over by pink poodles, “mirlipoos,” and a roguish male dog who bounds around and scratches his fleas. 

Hawaii’s residents search for pumpkin crunch 145 times as often as Americans elsewhere do, which is to say that the dish is more Hawaiian than wild rice casserole is Minnesotan or mirliton casserole is Louisianan.

There are lovely evocations of musical cultures in them, highlighting different instruments: listen for the trumpets and castanets in the Spanish dance; the strings and clarinets assuming the voices of Middle Eastern oud and ney in the Arabic dance; and the buoyancy of the flutes for the mirliton dance by Danish shepherdesses.