Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art

Published by Kodansha USA Publishing, LLC

451 Park Avenue South

New York, NY 10016

Distributed in the United Kingdom and continental Europe by Kodansha Europe Ltd.

Copyright © 1980, 2006, 2011 by Shizuo Tsuji.

Foreword copyright © 2006, 2011 by Ruth Reichl.

All rights reserved.

LCC 79-66244

ISBN 9781568363882

Ebook ISBN 9781568366166

First published in Japan in 1980 by Kodansha International

Revised edition 2006 published in Japan by Kodansha International

First US edition 2011 published by Kodansha USA

kodansha.us

a_prh_5.6.1_c0_r4

Contents

FOREWORD Ruth Reichl

INTRODUCTION M. F. K. Fisher

NEW PREFACE Yoshiki Tsuji

PREFACE

COLOR PLATES

Part One

The Japanese Meal

Ingredients

Utensils

Knives

Selecting and Cutting Fish, Chicken, and Vegetables

Basic Stock—Dashi

Making Soups—Suimono and Shirumono

Slicing and Serving Sashimi

Grilling and Pan-Frying—Yakimono

Steaming—Mushimono

Simmering—Nimono

Deep-Frying—Agemono

Japanese Salads—Sunomono and Aemono

One-Pot Cooking—Nabemono

Rice—Gohanmono

Sushi Varieties

Noodles—Menrui

Pickling Vegetables—Tsukemono

Sweets and Confections—Okashi

Tea and Saké

Part Two

Soups—Suimono and Shirumono

Sashimi

Grilled and Pan-Fried Dishes—Yakimono

Steamed Dishes—Mushimono

Simmered Dishes—Nimono

Deep-Fried Dishes—Agemono

Salads—Sunomono and Aemono

One-Pot Dishes—Nabemono

Rice Dishes—Gohanmono

Sushi

Noodles—Menrui

Sweets—Okashi

Miscellaneous

APPENDICES

Seasonal Japanese Fish

Fish Available in United States Markets That Can Be Used in Japanese Cooking

Calorie Table of Selected Japanese Foods

Weights and Measures—Metric Conversion Tables

INDEX

Foreword

I wonder if I can even begin to explain to you what the world I lived in—the world of food—was like when I first picked up this book?

Let me try. Imagine this: If you were a restaurant critic at the time, you did not need to know about anything but the food of France, with a smattering of what was then called Continental Cuisine thrown in for good measure. It is hard to conceive, in this age of supermarket sushi, but back then Japanese food was so unfamiliar to Americans that Shizuo Tsuji felt obliged to tell his readers that they would find sashimi unbearably exotic, almost bordering on the barbaric. While urging them to taste it, he conceded that this would require a great sense of gastronomic adventure and fortitude. He was convinced that the only people with any real understanding of his native food were those who had already visited his country.

But even those of us who had not visited Japan were aware that most people were transformed by the experience. It seemed to me that this was especially true for people who cared about food. The chefs of France, who had all gone off to taste sushi and tempura, had been so captivated by the Japanese esthetic that they changed the way they cooked. Like French artists at the turn of the century, whose contact with the art of Japan had literally offered a new perspective on the world, the great French chefs of the 1970s and 80s returned from the east and began to radically rethink their art. Traditional French cooking had been a way of bending nature to the will of man, but now the chefs began to look at what they were doing from a different position. For centuries the French had been focused on the arcane chemistry of the kitchen, but now they began to emphasize the integrity of ingredients. Influenced by Japan, Nouvelle Cuisine put nature first and insisted upon a new reverence for simplicity.

It was a virtual revolution in dining. The classic three-course meal of rich and generous dishes based on butter and cream was elbowed aside by a parade of exquisitely spare little dishes. How did Americans react? Most people made fun of it. There were jokes—endless jokes—about the portions being so small that you had to go out to dinner after dinner when eating Nouvelle Cuisine.

Like so many food writers of the time, I was intrigued by this new approach to cooking. But I was even more excited by the changes it entailed. This emphasis on simplicity meant that chefs went looking for new sources for their products and embraced an entirely new universe of ingredients. Menus began to change. Tableware changed too, for this food spoke to the eye as well as the mouth, giving the plate an entirely new place at the table.

Before long American chefs also began making their way to Japan. The first I heard of this was during an interview I was conducting with Paul Prudhomme for a story on Cajun cuisine. Paul couldn’t stop talking about a kaiseki dinner he had been invited to in Tokyo. It was, he said with a kind of awe, the most expensive meal he had ever eaten, and by far the most beautiful. And it included dozens of exotic, exciting, and unfamiliar ingredients. Listening to his sonorous voice, I began to feel that I too needed to go to Japan and taste the food for myself.

But I knew that I could not make the trip without doing some serious preparation. I understood that the only way to truly experience this traditional cuisine was to learn the rules before I went. I asked Japanese friends for help, and through them I began to learn the correct order of the Japanese meal. I discovered that it progressed in methodical fashion from the simplicity of clear soups and sashimi to increasingly complex dishes, before ending up with the jolt of vinegared salads and then slowly winding down again with rice, miso soup, pickles, and tea. I struggled to get my mouth around the difficult syllables—suimono, aemono—and to memorize all the things you were not allowed to do with chopsticks (never, ever, leave them upright in a bowl of rice). I tried to remember not to put sushi in the soy sauce rice-side down, and to abstain from saké when eating rice.

One friend translated an entire book of restaurant reviews for me, circling the best places to eat soba, ramen and tempura, and noting with some pride that many of these venerable establishments had remained unchanged for hundreds of years. When I asked about the kaiseki food that Prudhomme had described, he shook his head and said that it was extremely unlikely that I would be allowed to experience that particular pleasure. The great kaiseki restaurants, he explained, offered a kind of edible poetry served on antique dishes, and one could not simply call up and make a reservation: introductions were required. And then, on the off-chance that I might manage to wangle a reservation for one of these exalted establishments, he told me that protocol demanded that I go to the bank beforehand so that I could pay the (enormous) bill in crisp, new, consecutively numbered bills.

All this, of course, only made me more eager to visit the mysterious country where eating required such esoteric knowledge. What I did not discover, until I actually went to Japan, was that the great lessons of the Japanese kitchen had absolutely nothing to do with style and everything to do with substance. The real lesson of Japan was learning to live with the seasons. And that, of course, meant finding out what was growing all around you.

I suspect that is why, when I asked Mary Frances Fisher what advice she had to give me before I left for Japan, she handed me this book. Everything you need to know is right here, she said.

But it’s a cookbook, I replied. I’m not going to be cooking in Japan.

No, she said in her sphinx-like way, it is much more than a cookbook.

She was right of course; this is much more than a cookbook. It is a philosophical treatise about the simple art of Japanese cooking. Appreciate the lessons of this book, and you will understand that while sushi and sashimi were becoming part of American culture, we were absorbing much larger lessons from the Japanese. We were learning to think about food in an entirely new way.

Did we know it at the time? I don’t think so. I don’t think we truly understood that the kind of eating in which the diner is constantly making value judgments—this is the moment for sea urchins, this the time of year to eat monkfish liver—turns almost everything that Americans once thought about food on its head. To truly appreciate Japanese cuisine means learning to appreciate quality and paying attention to every bite. What we were learning, when we started eating Japanese food, was that to truly eat well you must open up all your senses and become aware of the world around you.

When Mary Frances Fisher handed me my copy of this book, she said, Read this, and you will understand why Japanese food is important to you.

I cannot put it better.

Ruth Reichl

New York, 2006

Introduction

It is strange, and perhaps inexplicable, that a person like me was asked by a person like Shizuo Tsuji to write a preface to his book.

Shizuo was a Wunderkind when I met him more than twenty years ago, and by now he is something of an éminence grise in the art of teaching young Japanese cooks to understand what their own food is based on, and where it comes from, and why it can be bountiful or scarce. His school in Osaka is called the Ecole Hôtelière Tsuji, or in another Western language, the Tsuji Culinary Institute. It is impressive, with more than 2,500 students. Their basic education is in their own national cooking, both past and present as well as regional. Once they have passed rigorous tests, about forty percent of them go on in their native field, hoping to make their mark in Japan’s great restaurants, or to inherit their families’ country inns, or even to enter the enormous wholesale food industry as buyers or purveyors. Another ten percent of the post-graduates stay on at the Institute to learn Chinese techniques. The rest, perhaps the most ambitious, study French haute cuisine, taught by the famous chefs Shizuo Tsuji entices to Osaka from Roanne, Collonges, Paris.

And that is the school I went to, for two peculiar and dreamlike weeks in October of 1978, with my sister Norah Barr. I wanted to see for myself what was happening in a chancy modern field of East-West eating.

Aside from our watching some forty-five private demonstrations at the two Tsuji buildings in Osaka (there will soon be another one in Tokyo), and coping with about thirty gastronomical onslaughts, no matter how gently subtle, in restaurants and inns and street-shops, we tasted seed pods and ginkgo nuts, and native fruits like twentieth century pears, as juicy as a ripe melon and as crisp as a frosty apple…seaweeds, dried or fresh, poached or swished through broths…plum jam, sour as Hell’s wrath, in a tiny bowl with two quarter-inch cubes of fried liver from a sea bass…the ovaries of a sea slug, buried in froth skimmed from boiling crushed soybean…slender cucumbers, faintly sour from their vat of fermenting rice bran…ices made from fruit pulps, beaten without sugar and pressed back into their hollowed skins…

I was curious, and I still am.

Until a few weeks before Norah and I flew to Japan, I had accepted Tsuji’s compliments about my way of writing as part of his Oriental respect for older people, mixed with his natural pattern of flattery as a part of good manners. But when he asked me to come to Osaka as a professional, I suddenly realized that he was in earnest about my writing something for him, instead of merely being friendly and courteous.

Norah, who had met Shizuo and who knew of our long pleasant relationship, suggests that it is based on a strong mother-son feeling he has for me, somewhat as he does even more strongly for Madame Fernand Point, of La Pyramide, and as he does most strongly of all for Samuel Chamberlain, who was his spiritual father, and who is now the constant image of his devotion. My sister’s theory is thus a great compliment to me, if true!

Whatever the reasons, Shizuo did ask me to write some kind of introduction to the 220 recipes he has chosen, to prove to readers of the Western world that traditional Japanese cookery can and should be a useful part of our own way of eating. At times I am not completely sure that he is right. The preparation and serving of fine as well as routine Japanese food is more obviously mixed, than is ours, with other things than hunger.

At its best, it is inextricably meshed with aesthetics, with religion, with tradition and history. It is evocative of seasonal changes, or of one’s childhood, or of a storm at sea: one thin slice of molded fish purée shaped like a maple leaf and delicately colored orange and scarlet, to celebrate Autumn; a tiny hut made of carved ice, with a little fish inside made of chestnut paste and a chestnut made of fish paste, to remind an honored guest that he was born on a far-north island; an artfully stuffed lobster riding an angry sea of curled waves of white radish cut paper-thin, with occasional small shells of carved shrimp meat tossing helplessly in the troughs….

All this delicate pageantry is based on things that we Westerners are either unaware of or that we accept for vaguely sentimental reasons. Some of us still eat fish on cue, or matzo, because both priests and parents have taught us to, without much thought about anything but how good they will taste. The past is not as important as the present, nor is religious symbolism open in our thoughts. As children raised in lands of plenty, we do not learn to count on a curl of carrot and one fried ginkgo nut to divert us from the fact that the rest of the food on the plate consists of an austere mound of rice and two pinches of herb paste. We have never been taught to make little look like much, make much out of little, in a mystical combination of ascetic and aesthetic as well as animal satisfaction.

Not only are our ideas of what is delicate and rare different from those of the Japanese, but so is our conditioning. We North Americans, for instance, must combine many ethnical influences in our methods of cooking and eating, because we are all the offspring of other cultures. Our physical habits are different, so that we chew and swallow and sip and raise food to our mouths differently, with different tools.

There are many things about eating in Japan that we either accept instinctively or never learn or care to imitate. It is socially correct there, for instance, to make a loud sucking sound when one eats noodles (or drinks tea, on some social levels). This is basically sensible, since the cool air that goes into one’s mouth with the food makes it possible to eat it steaming hot. But such noisy slurping is foreign to our own etiquette.

In much the same way, many Westerners, especially those of us with Anglo-Saxon backgrounds, have been taught not to pick our teeth, at table or indeed anywhere in public. In Japan, though, toothpicks are used almost ceremoniously by gentlemen at fine banquets or in public eating places, with one hand held like a curved fan before the mouth, while the other digs about. Small flat boxes, often very beautiful, hold the picks, which are wrapped in silky paper in fine restaurants.

Another difference, and one that Westerners accept more easily, is the Japanese way of eating, with chopsticks, the solid bits of food from a soup bowl, and then drinking the liquid from it. Like the other habits, this one is practical and simple—as is the custom of holding the bowl near one’s chin, or using it as a catchall when transferring food to one’s mouth after dipping it in the little bowls of sauces that are part of many meals.

Few people are completely austere by nature, and the Japanese enjoy the way food feels in their mouths and bellies as much as we do. They are basically more aware, possibly, of the functional beauty of a bowl or plate than we are. This does not mean, of course, that when a porter or streetcar conductor stops for a ten-minute lunch at a noodle-shop, he contemplates the pattern of the container, the significant tangle of the udon in their clear broth, the cloud-form of steam that rises, the symbolism of all this as a message both from Heaven and to it! He sucks the hot soup in as fast as he can, and pushes the thick noodles into his mouth with his chopsticks, from the bowl held close to it, and then he dashes back to work, untroubled by either aesthetics or an empty stomach.

Celebrations and festivals, though, are times for thoughtful attention, and fortunately there are many of them in Japan. It is then that tradition takes over, as far as modern life will let it, and perhaps an extravagantly lively sea bream will be bought instead of a can of mackerel, and the housewife will shave a cupful of the best dried bonito and use a slice of special seaweed to make a real dashi, instead of using a few spoonfuls of synthetic soup powder dissolved in boiling water.

Mostly, however, festive families will join millions of other people on the city streets and in the parks, and will treat themselves to an extra bottle of sticky soft drink and perhaps, in honor of Grandmother Itako or the first plum blossoms or the waning August moon, they will buy picnic boxes elegant with chicken, to lay out on a bench, instead of slurping their usual bowl of soup at a street-stand. It is doubtful that many will give a thought to the classical cookery of their country, formalized and artful, which few but the super-rich now taste.

And this is why some scientists and artists and intellectuals are worrying about the present and future of their national food, the Japanese ryōri. They hold seminars and debates about the fast-changing tastes in their country. They write books, like the six-volume Nippon no Ryōri, edited by Dr. Tadao Umesao, in hopes of showing housewives and even restaurant cooks that convenience-foods and microwave ovens and deep-freeze boxes can produce nourishment that need not be robbed of all its traditional taste and interest. Unless such a last-ditch effort works, most of the experts say, Japanese ryōri, as it has been known for the past two hundred years, is done for.

This concern for cultural standards is the reason for a book like Shizuo Tsuji’s of course. Indirectly, it is probably my own reason for writing a preface to it: I want all of us, East or West, to fight against mediocrity and its gradually lower standards of eating, just as passionately as do my friend Tsuji and his learned peers in both Academe and the kitchen.

Shizuo does not expect a hundred million Japanese to crave fourteen courses of airy-fairy fantasy every night for dinner, any more than I expect every compatriot here at home to eat a daily sirloin steak with all the fixin’s. We both wish, though, that the staples of our diets could stay honest. In Japan, udon noodles in broth can be delicious. In Italy and France and here, pasta can be fine—and so can hamburgers! The problem is to keep them good. The great international companies that will have increasing influence on our eating habits do not seem to care much, if at all, about helping our taste buds stay keen and alive, since if no really excellent food is procurable, they know that we will perforce buy an inferior substitute…and second- rate stuff is cheaper and apparently easier to market, anyway.

In Japan, there are not-bad dehydrated foods like soup powders and one-dish meals of wonton-in-broth, which even farm children eat instead of what their parents were raised on. But few manufacturers will bother to produce a commendable packaged staple like plain noodle soup. In somewhat the same way, here in North America anyway, decent bread is very hard to find, unless it is home-baked, because cheaper bread, almost zero in nutrition, is easier to produce and distribute. Everywhere, shoddy stuff is gradually the only procurable substitute for honest goods.

One formal definition of shoddy is transparently imitative. Across the United States, so-called Japanese restaurants serve smelly copies of grease-soaked tempura, and from the Ginza in Tokyo, Big Macs and Kentucky fried chicken, fumy with additives and exhausted fats, spread out over a country where for hundreds of years small neighborhood food-shops have provided their own hot bowls and cold snacks, or their local versions of pickles and sweets. Often they have grown famous, as one generation after another has carried on the family recipes, so that canny travellers will stop in a certain village long enough to eat two bowls of a special shrimp soup, or take home some rolls of a fruit paste that has been exactly the same, past remembering.

Yet the Japanese have long been accustomed to on the run eating, and franchised soup-bars and pasta-parlors are now a thriving phenomenon. An American critic who has dismissed quick-food hamburger chains as the quintessence of shoddiness in our times warns us, just as Tsuji-san and his peers repeat on television and in university halls, that by the time shoddiness becomes sufficiently visible…its roots have penetrated deeply (Alan Rich, New York Magazine, December, 1978). And when does shoddy become junk?

We all ask this. Not enough of us are frightened. But books like this one are written—stubbornly, proudly—by people like Shizuo Tsuji who cannot tolerate letting their national taste falter and die.

Students of the influence of gastronomy on this national taste, and therefore on politics and such seemingly distant subjects, from Brillat-Savarin in France of the early nineteenth century to Umesao in present-day Japan, believe that what and how a man eats in his first few years will shape his natural appetite for the rest of his life. It will not matter if he begins as a potter’s son and ends as an affluent banker. If he ate pure fresh food when he was a child, he will seek it out when he is old and weary, it is said. Dr. Umesao cites his own case: raised in Kyoto, where the flavors of every dish are believed, at least by the natives, to be subtler than anywhere else in Japan, he now stays near enough to his home town to return there every weekend, to buy fish that is fresh enough to satisfy his childhood recollections. In any other city, he says scornfully, the fish in markets is inedible. His palate, he adds, was shaped irrevocably when he was a child.

This theory, which I mostly agree with, has taken a double blow for me because of Shizuo’s invitation to come to Osaka. Not only does my palate refresh itself daily with foods almost as simple as the first ones I knew, but I feel that it has stayed young because of my natural curiosity about the best dishes that other countries have offered me. And now, after two weeks in Japan, I must admit with real astonishment that if I could eat as I did there under my friend’s subtle guidance, I would gladly turn my back on Western food and live on Japanese ryōri for the rest of my life.

Such a pattern would be difficult for me to follow. There, few people without princely revenues and highly evolved palates are served the dishes Norah and I ate. I could never afford to buy them, even as an occasional luxury. For the same reason, neither could I go to the rare restaurants in Japan where such intrinsically pure food is still prepared, even if for political or professional or social reasons my reservation might be accepted.

Wealth is so much a part of protocol in Japan that one must know this Personage in Tokyo, that Eminence in Osaka, in order to make a reservation at a certain restaurant in Kobe for precisely 8:10 P.M. six months hence. This is out of my sphere of survival, except for the one such adventure in my life. I know, though, that the food I ate during those amazing days in 1978 has changed my whole palate, or, perhaps the gastronomers would say, it has simply strengthened the taste I acquired as a child…?

This is not to say that I could not and would not live well in Japan, just as I manage to do here in the States. I would eat seasonal fruits and vegetables in either place, and honest fresh-caught fish when available, and would surely find a source there for noodle dough now and then….

For the first twenty years of my life I ate healthily of simple good American food. I grew up in Southern California, but our kitchen was generally ruled by Midwestern habits, overlaid by Ireland, Pennsylvania, and upper New York State through my grandparents and their forebears. That is to say, we had fresh bread and milk, produce from our own or neighboring gardens, and local meat and poultry with their accompanying butter and eggs and suchlike. Everything was taken as a matter of course, with small fuss except on holidays, when for dessert we ate Lady Baltimore cake and ice cream instead of rice pudding.

The next several decades of my life were spent partly in France and French Switzerland, with occasional stays in Cornwall and even Sweden, to accentuate the positive influence of my beginnings. I grew to know, sometimes actively, the ardors and ordeals of cooking in several European and American kitchens, and I went to as many high-style restaurants and hotels as opportunity offered, and read and talked and thought about the art of eating.

The result was that I agreed with my teachers that classical French and Chinese cuisines were the basic arbiters of an educated palate. I knew without any false modesty that my own would never be as well trained as I would like, but I felt no qualms about remaining a willing novice. And always I felt grateful for the simplicity and honesty of my first education in eating. Oddly enough, now that I have found what Japanese ryōri can be at its best—that is to say, the perfect food for me—I am not frustrated or sad. Perhaps that is because it is, to be blunt and brutal, almost unattainable. I know that never again can I eat as subtly and exquisitely, in effect as honestly, as I did for two weeks in my life. That is a fait accompli, an historical fact never to be repeated.

One immediate result of this intense experience is that when I cook for myself now, I am increasingly simple in both the sources of food and its preparation, and that when I must eat in other houses or restaurants, I find the dishes heavy and overflavored, and the supplies not fresh enough. When I first came home from Osaka, it was difficult to use butter, impossible for several weeks to drink milk, unnecessary to pick up a salt shaker or a peppermill.

Norah and I did not eat only as the industrial princes eat, in Japan. Shizuo sent us for lunches to the best noodle-shop in Osaka, the best tempura place in Kobe. But his humblest-seeming restaurants, which often seated only five or seven people at a time, were of such high quality that they sold all their scraps, all their used frying oils and suchlike, to lesser places. Their cooks, who worked across a snow-white cedar counter from us, were the most skilled in the country. Fish leaped from glass tanks to the cleavers and the pans and then into our mouths, in a ballet of accumulated motions and flavors.

After I returned to San Francisco, I went to a stylish new Yaki Tori Bar, as it was called. Deft young chefs worked in traditional style behind the long dark counter we sat at, and the walls looked mysterious with dim shapes of pottery jugs and bottles, and there was a subtle smell of overused hot oil. The cooks laid little sticks of whatever we had asked for, two at a time, in front of us…bits of chicken, bits of fish, even ginkgo nuts, dipped into the suspicious fat and then grilled. Tea was served, or beer. The cups and dishes were very thick and brown, like the place and its pervasive smell, and its ultimate phoniness.

Westerners looked a little shy there, perhaps to watch everything being done so baldly in front of them. There were one or two Oriental couples, possibly Korean. The diners most at ease were an elderly Caucasian and his wife, plainly Old Hands, who used their chopsticks with skill, and seemed to be happy together in a vaguely familiar setting.

It was depressing. I wondered miserably why refrigeration had spoiled so much while it kept things from spoiling…why the bits of fish (albacore, it was called on the brown thick menu card) were flabby and sweetish, pulled on their little sticks from a series of iceboxes under the counter…why the cubes of chicken (really turkey) were half-frozen even after their oil bath and the ritual of sizzling over the grill….

I knew, like a gong sounding far back in my head, what Japanese friends who worked with Norah and me in Osaka had meant when they half-cursed Tsuji-san for making it difficult for them ever to enjoy wholeheartedly the business meals they must return to in Tokyo. Average-to-good would never really satisfy them again.

I felt lost, full of misgivings about how to explain why I think the Japanese ryōri, the basic food that is now in such a state of flux, can be not only acceptable but welcome to our way of life, of eating. Then I thought, as we left the stylish and dubiously honest ryōri-ya in San Francisco, of how closely the best of Japanese cooking works with and influences the new styles in French and therefore Western food. High priests of nouvelle cuisine and cuisine minceur are good friends of Tsuji-san, and have worked with him both in Osaka and in their own country. All of them worship at the feet of Escoffier, the first great cook in our Western time to say to his apprentices, Stay simple! Cook simply!

The long-time association between the refinements of French and Chinese cooking seems to have shifted to one that is more applicable to our current life style, so that we now think easily in terms of French and Japanese similarities. We want to make less seem like more. We eat lightly, compared with classical cooking rules, and in a Japanese rather than a Chinese way we shun many starches, fats, sugar.

We find high style in low calorie counts exactly right for our repudiation of the Edwardian silhouette (low paunches and high breasts and dangling jowls, and their final reward of apoplexy…), and try eagerly to imitate an artful curl of radish and one broiled mushroom elegantly placed on a thin bed of minced spinach as our password to the future. (Où sont les sauces d’antan?) Perhaps it started for us with Whistler and the Japanese simplicity of his mother’s portrait? The fact remains that Zen austerity now intrudes on our old dreams of pastry shaped laboriously into towers of caramel and whipped cream and candied violets….

Eastern countries have had more time than we Westerners to accustom their people to less rich food than we are used to. Here we load the tables, at Christmas and other celebrations and even for Sunday Noon Dinner, to prove that all’s well with the world. In Japan, though, as in many other places on this shrinking planet, there is not space to grow enough food to feed all the people. So one perfect fruit (pear from home, papaya from Hawaii, coconut from Algeria) will be carved and arranged into symbolic patterns that can be religious (intricately Buddhist, less intricately Shinto perhaps), or merely sentimental (falling rain, the first cherry blossoms, a honeymoon in Honolulu). It will answer many hungers, and its design will be savored slowly. And the same dessert, in Paris or Denver, may taste equally delicious because it is low in calories, dietetically safe, a fashionable fantasy, straight from Bocuse-Guérard et Cie by way of Kyoto.

Obviously Europeans and Americans are deeply interested in changing their gastronomical patterns. They are sincere, whether for faddish reasons, newly discovered religious or economic convictions, or plain instinct, in wanting to stop eating as much as in the past, and in cutting down their conditioned dependence on fats, dairy products, starches, sugar. Some of them may have flocked like well-heeled lemmings to a fashionable spa in France, and then continued their newfound bien-être in the most stylish restaurants of London and New York. Others may have discovered dietary freedom in a hillside commune in California, or a quasi-Buddhist retreat near Barcelona. But all of them practice what they have been preached, at least for a while, and feel as restored spiritually by their brown rice and herb teas as by more worldly gods and goals.

This free acceptance, no matter how unwitting, of the intrinsic asceticism of Oriental cooking, is suspected by some observers to be a kind of intuitive preparation for the much leaner days to come to all of us who live on a polluted planet. What is now a stylish fad, or an awakening, depending on both pocketbook and chronology, may become in the future an exotic recollection of the Good Old Days, when carrot curls and cashew nuts were eaten by caprice and not necessity. A latter-day MacLuhan might argue that our current preoccupation with culinary simplicity is really an instinctive recognition of our diminishing supplies of food…of our need to accept austerity as the rule, after a long time of heedless Western glut.

All this sounds like some sort of celestial plot, a kindly trick of Nature, and perhaps it is. My friend Shizuo Tsuji wants to explain to us (as part of the plot?) his own theory of how and why the Japanese cuisine can be attractive to us. He believes that its combination of subtlety and simplicity has done much to keep Japan a strong nation, especially during the last hundred years of social changes and of revolutions and wars and cultural invasions. Even the Big Mac and Kentucky fried chicken cannot displace udon, he believes, as long as the noodles stay as honest as the broth they float in.

Tsuji-san is the first to admit to a love of ice cream, and is probably the first authority on traditional Japanese ryōri to invest in an expensive Western machine for it, and certainly the first reputable teacher of gastronomy to set his prize pupils to work at devising practical ways to make pure ice cream for their countrymen, without loading it with unhealthy sugar and unaccustomed milk products. He is, like his peers, aware that Japan can adjust to almost any change, and he is determined to keep that change beneficent rather than let it become one more compromise with mediocrity and shoddiness.

In Japan, red meat has been a status food since perhaps the late nineteenth century. Today it comes from cattle that were originally imported to please foreign palates, or from mammals caught and fast-frozen in far northern waters. It can be superb or routine, like broth made with special seaweed and dried bonito or with a synthetic dashi powder. In other words, one eats according to one’s pocketbook—Kobe beef or fish, both prestigious in their own brackets.

This acceptance of imported gastronomical props shows in the three types of popular dishes in Japan, which are not native at all. At least half the population of more than a hundred million people like, eat, thrive on bowl-meals from China (ramen in soup), and India (curry-rice), and Italy (spaghetti with tomato sauce). In the same way sugar, which became available to the masses less than two hundred years ago, is now absorbed almost frantically, often as a chemical sweetener and mostly in soft drinks, laced according to their secret formulae with other potentially pernicious additives. Soybeans, which can be called a protein staple of the Japanese, whether eaten as packaged bean curd (tōfu) from the supermarket or as a salty fermented paste (miso), or as the ubiquitous soy sauce (shōyu), used to be bought from China, and now come largely from the Americas.

In other words, cooking is forever a compromise with historical fact and fancy, and Tsuji-san believes that there must be passionate leaders who know how to keep that compromise honest. As a Japanese, he wants his people to remember what has been best, gastronomically, in their history, and try to keep it intrinsic to the inevitable changes of the future.

As an American, a Westerner, I agree. I want us to keep everything we know of honesty and quality, in eating habits formed during our short history, and shaped by our diverse ethnic heritage, so that we can bow in a basically healthy way to whatever the future may dictate. Inspired French cooks have simplified their art according to Japanese teachings, not too coincidentally, so that now we can eat either nouvelle or minceur in Pasadena as well as Paris. We can keep our inborn sense of taste as a cultural necessity to survival, thanks to the simplicity of flavors and satisfactions we learn daily from teachers who in turn have learned.

Escoffier said, Cook simply! The Japanese ryōri says, Let little seem like much, as long as it is fresh and beautiful. The French and their Western cousins look at their medical records as well as their silhouettes, and agree to a new austerity that at its best returns them to a simpler and more honest way of living, and at its worst proves only that shoddiness can never be anything but a transparent imitation of the truth.

An authority on transferring the best of one national cuisine to another (in this case Diana Kennedy, who has studied and written wisely of Mexican foods for American readers and cooks) has said often and firmly that we must never try to adapt one cuisine to another, but instead adjust the two. As we come to know and use many of the finer things about traditional Japanese ryōri, therefore, Westerners can, with few changes in their hereditary conditionings, adjust themselves to some shifts in pattern and even in behavior without losing their own identity at the table.

Perhaps we can never sit with fascination through fourteen courses of nostalgic nibbles, each with its own place setting and each highly significant in one way or several. Quite probably we can never learn to slurp noodles with correct speed and enjoyment, especially if we were raised in the neo-Victorian tradition. We may never really like chopsticks, which I myself think are fine utensils for picking up small strange objects in the depths of bowls. But just as the Japanese adjusted their palates to sugar as an additive in the nineteenth century, and more lately to Indian curry rice and pasta with tomato sauce and even Kentucky fried chicken, and hamburgers in buns, and cokes, so we have adjusted to the imported versions of tempura and sukiyaki and daring displays of knifework with meats prepared before our dazzled eyes and broiled under our noses.

All these tricks have been adjusted, and skillfully. So why not an occasional long celebration of a birthday in the Japanese manner of a multitude of tiny courses? Why not a full lunch of fresh hot udon in good broth, perhaps with some slices of raw mushroom or even a few helpless bay-shrimp turning color at the bottom?

Yes, we can adjust to all this, and we must simplify our cooking just as the Japanese have done, by learning a few more of its complexities, while we still have time.

M.F.K. Fisher

Glen Ellen, 1979

Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition

From the time early humans first sprinkled a handful of rock salt on a roasted haunch of musk ox, to the present day, where wizards of molecular cuisine may dust a Petri dish of flavored foam with powdered olive oil, the world of gastronomy has been the scene of constant change.

But even a veteran observer of the shifting culinary realm would have been hard pressed to predict the scope of the changes that have taken place since 1980 when this book was first published. Who, for example, would have been bold enough to forecast that in 2006, diners in Indianapolis and Moscow would be sipping saké while consuming prodigious amounts of raw tuna? Or that a Japanese chef would become a household name in America, serving spicy Peruvian sashimi to Hollywood stars while building a global restaurant empire?

Twenty-five years ago Japanese cuisine was still something of a mystery, and Japanese restaurants in New York, London, and Paris catered mainly to expatriate Japanese who labored overseas as their country’s bubble economy ascended ever higher. As we all know, what goes up must come down, so when the bubble finally burst and Japanese companies reduced their overseas staff, these expat restaurants were left without a clientele and many soon folded. In New York and London, a new generation of Japanese restaurants rose from the ashes to take their place and now serve not only Japanese, but a burgeoning crowd of local trendsetters, some of whom dine more often on Japanese food than their counterparts in Tokyo.

Against this background, I find it astonishing that Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art has endured these twenty-five years without a major revision. There are several factors that help explain this longevity. First and foremost, my father had an overwhelming desire to explain washoku (Japanese food) to a Western audience, and he spared no expense to research and write this book. This no doubt is the reason for the multilayered richness of the text, with each page home to a treasure trove of intriguing facts. One need only open the book at random to encounter these tidbits—on this page, for example, he explains how clam consommé is often served at wedding banquets because the hinged shell represents the happily joined couple. If one turns to this page, Fish One-Pot, they will discover that the fish’s head is a particular delicacy reserved for the guest of honor, and that if so honored, one need not eat the eyeballs—just the delicate meat around them.

In addition, the book and its recipes remain fresh and relevant because the basis of Japanese cookery itself has not changed during this time. The emphasis on impeccably fresh, seasonal ingredients and the simple seasonings of soy sauce and dashi (kelp and bonito stock) are still the bedrock of the cuisine.

Finally, coherent explanations for every step of the cooking process from start to finish, using a combination of words and illustrations that leave no doubt as to what the finished dish should be, make for an almost perfect Japanese Cooking 101 textbook. When early reviewers at a popular cooking magazine tested the recipes, they were astonished by how easy it was to successfully recreate the dishes featured in the book.

I actually considered a proposal for an extensive revision of the work in 1993, but after a careful review I came to the conclusion that there was nothing to be gained and much that could be lost in such a rewrite. I still feel that way today.

It is my hope that this book will inspire more cooks from around the world to come and study the higher levels of cooking in Japan, language and cultural barriers notwithstanding, just as Japanese cooks have done overseas. Learning about the food cultures of other countries shortens the distance between people, and that can only be good.

But most of all, I hope this 25th anniversary edition will initiate a whole new generation of cooks, both in home and professional kitchens, into the pleasures of Japanese cookery, and that they will not just follow the recipes but will learn to cook in the spirit of Japan, just as my father had intended when he created this book so many years ago.

Yoshiki Tsuji

Osaka, 2006

Preface

My lifelong admiration for the incomparable M. F. K. Fisher is exceeded only by my gratitude for her friendship and her kindness in agreeing to write an introduction to this book. It really did my heart good to see the way Mrs. Fisher comprehended so well the spirit and soul of Japanese cooking, although it was her very first visit to this country and her first real encounter with Japanese cuisine.

I fear, however, that most people in the West think of Japanese cooking as something so utterly foreign to their way of life that it does not concern them at all—something they need never know anything about. The purpose of this book is to try and dispel that notion. Especially now, with the general world revulsion against additives and preservatives, there is a message for everyone in the Japanese food ethos with its insistence on natural goodness. And even though they may not admit it, those arbiters of haute cuisine, the great French chefs, have come to Japan and seen with their own eyes what we do here, and I think I can detect something of what they have seen emerging in their nouvelle cuisine and cuisine minceur.

This book has been a long time in the making. Of all the books yet published on the cuisine of this country, none has had so much time and effort spent on it as this volume. Here, for the first time, the secrets of the simple yet complex art of Japanese cooking have been laid bare for all to see.

Cooks the world over are notoriously secretive about their special recipes, but nowhere more so than in Japan. The way of teaching every Japanese art has traditionally been an imperfect passing down from master to disciple of jealously guarded personal interpretations. The master never explained; he merely demonstrated. And it was left to the more perceptive students to glean what they could of the master’s art—filling in the gaps with their own ingenuity. Japanese cooking masters made it especially difficult. The part of his technique that a celebrated chef would demonstrate before his underlings was the virtuoso knifework and the finger dexterity that could only be achieved after years of experience and practice.

But that was mainly the decorative part of Japanese cooking. Its flavoring was far less complicated and too easily copied for a chef to take the chance of letting his juniors see how he blended his aromas. He would visit the kitchens in the dead of night, when the staff was asleep, to blend his subtle flavors. They could only guess how he had achieved his combinations. When all is said and done, Japanese cuisine is deceptively simple. Its key ingredients are but two: a rather delicate stock (dashi) made from konbu (giant kelp) and flakes of dried bonito, and shōyu, Japanese soy sauce. Its key requirements are also two: the pristine freshness and prime condition of materials used, and beauty of presentation.

Japanese cooking is the outcome of a long history and has a solid cultural background. But it is not an alien culture. Our culture is not difficult to understand. It is not really exotic at all, because the essence of Japan’s culture is its closeness to nature. Like Japanese painting and poetry, our cooking, too, is simply the result of an acute awareness of the seasons.

Japanese culture was born of austerity, an austerity that even obtained in the very seat of culture-the imperial court of ancient Kyoto. The impoverished but cultivated court nobles learned to delight in the offerings of each changing season as it came, making the most of nature’s provender when each article of food-fish, fowl, or vegetable-was at its prime. With meat made taboo from the introduction of Buddhism in the sixth century, the rich animal fats so familiar to Europeans were denied the Japanese, while the islands’ temperate climate at the same time denied them nature’s tropical largesse enjoyed in the countries where Buddhism began.

Making the most of nature’s seasonal offerings with the utmost culinary artistry probably gave rise to the traditional formal Japanese meal as we know it today, with its many small courses-each a work of art on which much time and thought are spent, the receptacles, too, constituting an important part of the experience. While each dish in a Japanese meal could quite easily be expanded in quantity to make a sizeable entrée in the Western sense, it is a tradition of formal Japanese cuisine never to serve a large amount of any one thing. (In your own home, of course, such rules need not apply.) Perhaps this is its biggest difference in relation to other cuisines. A Japanese banquet consists of a great many small portions. The greater the variety, the more extravagant the hospitality.

If a formal Japanese meal seems to you like a mere succession of hors d’oeuvres, you can quite easily adjust the recipes in this book to suit a Western menu. There are soups to choose from, both thick and thin. One of the fish, fowl, or meat dishes need only be enlarged in quantity and served with one of the many tasty vegetable recipes, together with rice. And Japanese salads need no adjustment at all.

Few Westerners visiting Japan—and even few Japanese, for that matter—are afforded the luxury of visiting an elegant and exclusive ryōri-ya, where the real Japanese cuisine in all its formal exquisiteness may be experienced. But fairly reasonable facsimiles can be had at Japanese inns; and specialty shops that serve only broiled eel or sushi or tempura are readily accessible. In fact, the specialty shops’ expertise in their own dishes exceeds that of the exclusive ryōri-ya. There are plenty of other accessible restaurants that serve many popular dishes, including the convivial one-pot meals of traditional home hospitality such as sukiyaki and shabu-shabu. These are the dishes that the Western visitor to Japan probably enjoys the most and finds the most hunger satisfying.

Some Japanese dishes may at first seem flat and insipid to many Westerners. To those accustomed to rich, filling sauces and stocks using butter, flour, and meat juices, many of our foods may seem thin and lacking in substance. But you must learn to look for the subtle, natural aroma and flavor of ingredients, purposely not masked with anything stronger than a touch of bonito stock (dashi) or soy sauce. The broth used, for instance, to cook bean curd in yudōfu (this page) is merely hot water containing a square of kelp. Anything else would mask the delicate but distinct aroma of the soybean from which the curd is made. Good tōfu has an intriguing taste all its own, highly appreciated by the Japanese gourmet.

Recipes for the many