The Man Who Ate Everything (36 page)

I blush when I consider how much of this food-poem went by me unnoticed. But ignorance has its own rewards. Japanese gourmets have always sought the mysterious and exotic in their ingredients and textures. As Diane Durston tells it in her indis
p
ensable
Old Kyoto
(Kodansha, 1986), the warlords and wealthy Merchants of the Edo period played a game of guessing what they
had just been served for dinner. Nothing could be more authentically Japanese than not knowing what you are eating.

A traditional Japanese chef works under a series of demanding constraints. His insistence on cooking foods only at their seasonal peak eliminates three-quarters of the possibilities at any one time. And his concern for freshness rules out most ingredients from other parts of the country. His recipes contain only four or five ingredients; I’ve made complex French sauces that require twenty. Japanese flavors seem to work as complements or counterpoints to each other; ours are meant to blend and orchestrate. Yet after a week of eating in Kyoto, you are unaware of any limitations. Your palate stops looking for strong, complex Western flavors, just as your eyes adjust to the soft light of a traditional Japanese house.

Japan imported Buddhism in the sixth century from the Asian mainland, where the semitropical profusion of fruits and vegetables made the Buddhist rule against killing easier to live with. But a relatively short growing season and little arable land forced the Japanese to rely on variety and ingenuity instead of abundance in their cooking. Many of the dishes we associate with Japan are relative newcomers.

Portuguese missionaries taught the Japanese how to deep-fry in the late sixteenth century (and brought them hot red peppers, too); as with many things, Japanese cooks have become the greatest deep-fry artists in the world, creating the incomparably light, crisp, and translucent tempura.

The most familiar form of sushi—slices of raw fish on bite-sized mounds of vinegared rice and properly called
nigirizushi—
was not invented until 1818.

For laypeople in Japan, the Buddhist rule against killing applied only to four-legged animals, making fish and fowl available. But cows, sheep, pigs, and goats were taboo until 1873, when the Meiji emperor announced that the Buddhist proscription was “irrational.” Sukiyaki appeared only at the turn of this century, and I’ve read that
shabu shabu
was devised after World War II by a Kyoto chef who had enjoyed a Mongolian hot pot in a Chinese restaurant. Of these, only tempura belong
in a
kaiseki
meal. Three hundred years is long enough, even in Japan, for something to become traditional.

Four fundamental raw ingredients underlie all Japanese cuisine—flavors that until now had struck me as monotonous and bland—rice, soybeans, dashi, and fish. Rice is served boiled or steamed at every meal and never fried; it is also made into sake, m
irin,
and vinegar, and its bran is used for pickling. Soybeans become soy sauce and tofu in all their varieties. And dashi is a simple, delicate broth of giant kelp (an olive-green seaweed) and dried bonito (a member of the mackerel family). Dashi is the base of nearly all soups; chicken stock appears only if one of the main solid ingredients in the soup is chicken.
Every Japanese dish or its dipping sauce is flavored with soy or dashi or both.

Before arriving in Japan, I had arranged an introduction from a mutual friend to Mr. Shizuo Tsuji, the renowned Japanese chef whose cooking school in Osaka—Ecole Technique Hoteliere Tsuji—is the largest and most important in Japan. (There is a branch in Lyons for his advanced students of French cuisine, and Mr. Tsuji has written an astounding illustrated encyclopedia of French cooking, published in a limited Japanese edition.) His
Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art
(Kodansha, 1980) is one of the finest cookbooks published in English about any cuisine, beautifully written without a touch of pretense and crystal clear in its essays, explanations of ingredients and techniques, line drawings, and 220 recipes.

Draconian and petty airline regulations prevented me from meeting Mr. Tsuji, but as soon as we arrived in Kyoto, we felt that
we were under his protection and tutelage. H
.
e recommended a variety of restaurants, telephoning one of them in advance to order our dinner. And near the end of our stay he dispatched to Kyoto his
directeur de cabinet,
Mr. Kazuo Nakamura, and a professor of Japanese cuisine, Mr. Kazuki Kondo, who took us to dinner at a restaurant named Chihana (A Thousand Flowers).

Chihana is a tiny place with a sandalwood counter and just
t
wo tables, all done in a variety of satiny blond woods, and it is
presided over by Mr. Nagata, the seventy-five-year-old chef-owner. The food is like a
kaiseki
banquet but served in an alternate manner popular in Kyoto. You sit at the counter, and Mr. Nagata and his oldest son hand you the food the moment it is prepared, discreetly watching your reactions with a sideways glance. First there was a series of tiny appetizers: a little cup of gelatinous
junsai
delicately flavored with dashi, soy, and vinegar (the first time I saw the point of eating
junsai);
plump raw clams with seaweed; the tenderest cold octopus, stewed for three hours in dashi, soy, and sake; sea trout grilled in salt with a sauce of
ume,
soy, and salt
(ume
are called plums but are really apricots); and barely cooked broad beans with a loose white rectangle of something called children-of-the-clouds. This is a welcome euphemism for the sperm of a fish, often cod but in this meal
tai
sperm. Its flavor is bland and difficult to describe, except to say that it does not taste like fish; its texture and appearance resemble tofu or unset custard. I do not expect to find children-of-the-clouds stands popping up in minimalls across America.

Now came the moment for clear soup and sashimi, “the test pieces of Japanese cuisine,” as Mr. Tsuji puts it, “the criteria by which a meal stands or falls… . The soup and raw fish are so important that the other dishes are merely garnishes.” The fish instantly reveals whether the chef sets high standards for freshness and seasonal perfection. That I can readily understand. But a bowl of clear soup as the centerpiece of a complicated feast? This is the course I listlessly sip at Japanese restaurants in New York or Los Angeles, if I touch it at all.

Across the sandalwood counter, Mr. Nagata handed me a covered bowl and said, “It is all right for you to start.” Translated from the polite language of the Japanese, this means “You’d better get started instantly or you’ll ruin my food.” I lifted the lid and was lost in a cloud of aromatic vapor, familiar but intense. I briefly noticed a cube of tofu, a shiitake mushroom, and a sprig of
kinorne
in the broth, and I began to drink it. The basic flavors were a summing up of the Japanese concept of
umami,
of savoriness, meatiness, mouthwateringness, the bliss-point of any food.
Uma
m
i
is
the Japanese fifth taste (our textbooks tell us there are four), and dried bonito, kelp, and shiitake all offer a concentrated dose of
umami.

On the way to the Osaka airport, I bought another copy of Mr. Tsuji’s
Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art
and read it all the way home as though it were a thriller. The mysteries of Mr. Nagata’s soup were easy to solve. “If the soup is good,” Mr. Tsuji says, “it proves that the chef knows how to blend his bonito stock—the flavor base of all the dishes to come.” You begin with a piece of kelp, a dense block of dried bonito fillet, and a quantity of good water. (Giant kelp is harvested from the subarctic waters off Rebun Island, in Hokkaido, and dried in the sun until it becomes amber brown and mottled with a white powder that bears much of its flavor. Bonito is dried in both shade and open air in a complicated process that takes six months.) You place the kelp in cold water over a medium flame and remove it just before the water boils. Then you shave the bonito into thin ribbons, using a special blade mounted on a wooden box, and add them to the broth. Bring it to the boil again, and turn off the heat. A minute later, when the bonito has settled to the bottom, strain the dashi.

To make a clear soup, you add a little salt and light soy sauce to the dashi, heat without boiling, and pour it into bowls with three or four little pieces of solid food. Cover the bowls immediately, or the precious aroma of the dashi will be lost, and serve within thirty seconds.

That’s it. The entire process takes twelve minutes. But only the most expensive restaurants in Japan still make dashi this way, and my newly educated taste buds have not detected its presence in New York. Most places use instant dashi powder or at best a plastic bag of commercial bonito shavings. Mr. Nagata’s simple, flawless soup sums up a traditional way of life in Japan that grows more remote with every passing day. Many modern Japanese have never tasted this central essence of their own cuisine.

Or even tasted real wasabi. This is the pungent green Japanese “horseradish” you add to dipping sauces, broths, and the rice in hand rolls and sushi. Wasabi is a long root that grows only in
the marshy banks of cold, fresh, free-flowing streams (and, it seems, only in Japan). The best wasabi grows on the Izu Peninsula, southwest of Tokyo, is very expensive, and should be grated right before you use it. True wasabi has a mellow, sweeter flavor than the acrid paste we get in this country (and in much of Japan), which is mixed from a powder or squeezed out of a tube like toothpaste and contains very little wasabi.

In M. F. K. Fisher’s introduction to Mr. Tsuji’s cookbook, she reveals her difficulty returning to Western food after several weeks in Japan. My reaction was similar. The thought of a whole grilled chicken lying on a big round plate to be dismembered by metal weapons seemed repulsive. I tried a few favorite Japanese restaurants in New York but missed the aroma of true dashi and the taste of real wasabi, the sprigs of
kinome
and the silkiness of sea bream. For an entire afternoon, I lost my appetite completely. One day I went out looking for a bonito shaver and came back with a sack of Japanese rice. Mr. Tsuji jokes that it takes twenty years to learn how to boil rice, and I am counting the days until the year 2011. But my first try was not a catastrophe.

Finally realizing that there is no way I can eat as I did in Kyoto, I slowly nursed myself back to health. I began by taking a spoonful of creme brulee now and then, a bite or two of pastrami on rye. Now, several weeks later, I can eat an entire small Western meal without much difficulty. But after dinner, I still feel a longing for a bowl of rice and two or three slices of fish.

September 1991

To get the most out of a trip to Venice, the traveler must master several local words and phrases. Two of the most useful are
Senta, portrei avere un’altra porzione colossale di vongole veraci
(Waiter, another gigantic bowl of those tiny little perfect spicy clams, please) and
Ucciderei per un piatto di cannocchie aiferri
(I would kill for a plate of those charcoal-grilled mantis shrimp, also known as squill, the sweetest crustacean in all creation).

The seafood of Venice and the Adriatic coast to the south is easily the best I have ever tasted, and on a recent trip there I ate nothing but mollusks, crustaceans, and fish for six days and nights. I could have kept it up forever if the lady at Pan Am had not thrown around words like “forfeiture with extreme prejudice” when I tried to extend my stay. It was my contention that the airlines should have warned me,
before
I bought the ticket, that I would completely miss the
seppioline
season.
Seppioline
are baby cuttlefish the size of your thumbnail, quickly deep-fried until they are crunchy and irresistible. As I was explaining this, the lady from Pan Am threw around words like “Ciao!” and the line went dead.

To say that I ate only seafood in Venice is an exaggeration. The Venetians have carelessly left many priceless paintings and mosaics in the churches for which they were created instead of collecting them conveniently in museums, and even a casual
survey of the major works requires relentless trudging from church to church. This, in turn, ignites the appetite. Eating
seafood in basilicas and museums is considered disrespectful, so you must bring along something else to tide you over. I recommend the roasted corn nuts sold throughout the Rialto market and the pungent, gaily colored licorice pastilles offered in every sweet shop. These put you in the proper mood to understand why the painters Carpaccio and Bellini truly deserve the food and drink that were named after them. Venice also has a wealth of pictures depicting dinner, of which my favorite is Veronese’s
Supper in the Pharisee’s House,
with its tempting rack of lamb and several round crusty loaves. And don’t miss Tintoretto’s
Creation of the Animals,
which shows eleven distinct species of fish leaping from the oceans that He had created just two days earlier.