The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [125]
The next tray held a little rectangular plate with three peeled fava beans; an egg cut in two (magically, the white was set and the lightly flavored yolk was liquid); a young ginger shoot that shaded from lavender to white; a cube of tofu omelet in a round dish; and two chimaki, one with raw tai and the other with eel, tied tightly in bamboo leaves. The tray was decorated with two tiny green maple leaves, a reminder of spring, in case we had forgotten.
In our clear soup we found a shrimp wrapped in yuba (a thick bean-curd skin), new peas, a tree-ear mushroom, and a lily root. Suzuki (sea bass) followed, deliciously panfried and brushed with a glistening, mildly sweet teriyaki sauce and garnished with the flower of the sancho tree, and then rice and pickles and another soup, this one containing bright green and white vegetables and abalone wrapped in a rectangle of fish. Bitter green tea was served with a slice of melon and then a light brown Japanese sweet that seemed no more explicable than any other Japanese sweet I’ve tasted. But the melon was an epiphany of melons: the skin of a cantaloupe, the green flesh and size of a honeydew, and the perfume and sweetness of a jungle thick with honeysuckles.
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 indispensable 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