The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [127]
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 crème brûlée now and then, a bite