The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [124]
It was May when we arrived in Kyoto. The tai were running, the kinome was in fine fettle, and takenoko were pushing up through the earth in the groves around Kyoto. Tai is Japanese sea bream, a firm, lean white-fleshed fish unlike the bream of other waters. Raw and sliced, it makes a fine sashimi (in May, often garnished with a baby cucumber, one inch long and still wearing its yellow flower); when slices of tai are wrapped around a long cone of vinegared rice and tied in bamboo leaf, it is called chimaki. May is also the month to eat bonito, karei flounder, horse mackerel, and sea trout. Westerners know that oysters are delectable only in cold months; Japanese chefs know the ideal time for a hundred kinds of fish.
Kinome is the bright green, newly formed leaf of the sancho (prickly ash) tree and the favorite herb of professional Japanese chefs, always used fresh and not, I think, eaten anywhere outside Japan. We found little, fern-shaped sprigs of kinome in every meal we had in Kyoto. Commonly described as light and minty, its wonderful astringent taste I find also reminiscent of lemon peel and coriander. A few weeks before our visit, the kinome was tiny and tasteless; a few weeks after, gross and bitter. And while in Kyoto, we could feel the kinome season slipping away as spring turned into summer and the leaves grew larger day by day.
Takenoko are bamboo shoots. I have spent a lifetime avoiding those stringy, tough, bitter canned bamboo shoots you find in Asian food in this country and wondering why anyone in the world would bother to cut off the tip of a bamboo plant just before it emerges from the earth, husk the thick woody covering, and eat its pale golden heart. Now, for the first time, I tasted them fresh—sweet and crunchy and tender—in a restaurant on the outskirts of Kyoto called Kinsuitei that serves, in thatched pavilions along a shaded lake, a many-course lunch of fresh bamboo: bamboo grilled on bamboo skewers, bamboo shredded with seaweed, bamboo sliced like sashimi with a soy-based dipping sauce, bamboo floating in soup, bamboo simmered in broth, bamboo deep-fried as tempura, and bamboo chopped in rice. Perhaps that’s the problem with impeccably seasonal food—you wait an entire year for the fleeting moment to arrive, and then you overdose.
Kyoto is the home of kaiseki ryori, perhaps the most refined and exquisite branch of Japanese cooking. This is formal Japanese haute cuisine, served in nine courses or more on antique ceramics and lacquerware, usually in a small private room. A kaiseki meal appeals to all the senses; only seasonal ingredients are used and only at the peak of their freshness.
Our friend Sunja traveled from Kobe to Kyoto and took us to a kaiseki lunch at the famous restaurant Hyotei, five teahouses joined by bamboo walkways in a lush garden around a little pond. It was raining when we arrived at the gate, and each of us was given a light, broad bamboo basket to hold over our heads as we walked the twenty feet to a three-hundred-year-old teahouse. I felt as if I had become a figure in a Japanese print.
Inside, a hanging scroll and purple irises in a narrow alcove set the mood of late springtime, as did the patterns and colors on ceramics and lacquerware throughout the meal. We sat on a tatami floor of woven grass, some sections fresh and green, others dry and crackling. The paper window screen was open to the garden, and rain trickled down from the thatched roof.
A little wooden table was placed before each of us, and for the next two hours a set meal was served in groups of dishes on lacquered trays, seven