It sounds to me as if you already have several solutions (eval, map, separate hash), but you don't want to use them for they are messy or complicated. My suggestion is to take one of them and encapsulate it off somewhere with some documentation that that tells future generations what it does.

my $dollar_one = node_693863( 'capri', [ 'Capri', 'Classic' ] );
print $dollar_one if defined $dollar_one;

# Documentation here
sub node_693863 {
    # your implementation here
}
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