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Put in the shrimp meats, and heat for a moment, then serve. Do not keep the soup waiting as this will toughen the shrimp tails.

NOTE If you use cooked shrimps or prawns, start their preparation at †, covering the debris very generously with white wine.

TEMPURA

In other words fritters, because the European fritter is thought to have been the origin of this popular Japanese food. When the Jesuit missionaries arrived with Saint Francis Xavier in sixteenth-century Japan, they ate the dish on Ember Days, fast days occurring at four periods of the year – the quattuor tempora – when ordinations could take place. The first Tokugawa ruler, Ieyasu, died about sixty years later from a surfeit of tai tempura, fritters of sea bream or tai, the most prized of Japanese fish. Some at least of the missionaries’ works had made devoted converts.

If you have an electric deep frier, you will find tempura easy to organize on the fondue bourguignonne principle – which is to say that all the separate ingredients that go to make up a tempura are prepared beforehand, and the cooking is done last of all at table with no loss of sociability for the cook. This is the ideal, because these rather delicate fritters should be eaten immediately, straight from the pan, each person dipping his piece into a small bowl of sauce the moment it is ready.

In Japan, chopsticks are used for both cooking and eating tempura. But unless you are very skilful with them, you will find it easier, when cooking, to make use of a perforated spoon in the normal way. Fondue forks are the obvious solution, if you have them.

Prepare the three elements of the dish – sauce, seafood and vegetables, batter – in the following order:

Serves 4

SAUCE

2 tablespoons sake

1 tablespoon mirin

or 3 tablespoons mirin or dry sherry with some sugar

2 tablespoons sugar

150 ml (5 fl oz) dashi or stock

Simmer together for two minutes. Pour into a bowl, or individual bowls, and leave to cool.

FISH AND VEGETABLES

16 mushrooms or dried shiitake

24 large prawns in their shells

24 mussels, scrubbed and scraped

2 aubergines

4 spring onions

Cut the stalks of fresh mushrooms level with the caps, or soak the shiitake until soft, drain them, and discard the stems. Shell the prawns. Open the mussels in a large pan, covered, over a very high heat (see p. 239); remove them from their shells (keep the cooking liquor for another dish). Cut the aubergines into 8 or 12 pieces each, according to their size. Trim roots and damaged outer skin from the spring onions. Arrange elegantly on a dish. (Other ingredients can be added – e.g. cubes of firm white fish fillets, pieces of young carrot, red and green pepper and so on.)

BATTER The master of a tempura restaurant in Tokyo, the famous Tenichi restaurant, has written a small book on the special foods of the capital. In it he gives this recipe for the correct, very light batter. He observes that the old way of reading the characters of the word tempura gives you ‘flour’ and ‘silk-gauze’. ‘The whole word could mean to wear light stuff of flour, as a woman wears silk-gauze that desire may be stimulated in the beholder by glimpses of the beauty underneath.’ This gives you a good idea of what the fritters should look like when they are ready to eat.

Break an egg into a measuring container, and whisk it smooth. Add four times its bulk of water, then five times its bulk of flour. In other words, if your egg occupies 30 ml (1 fl oz), you should end up with 300 ml (10 fl oz) of batter. Whisk well.

TO COOK Heat a pan of deep oil to 177–182 °C (350–360 °F). Dip the individual pieces of food into the batter, shake off the surplus, and deep-fry for a few minutes until the coating is crisp and a rather whitish brown. With the spring onions, you will find it easier to use your fingers for dipping them into the batter rather than a perforated spoon. If you are not handing out the cooked fritters straight from the