The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [126]
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, mirin, 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—École Technique Hôtelière 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. He 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 two 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