It is virtually unheard of for a Japanese taxi driver to give up on a destination, but that day mine finally had to admit defeat after twenty minutes’ fruitless circling, his honor in tatters. He let me out and waved away the fare with a dejected shake of his head. I was on foot from here, with not much to go on.
We had been in Kyoto for over a week, and I was on the trail of a culinary missing link that I had heard could be found in Higashiyama, the eastern quarter of Old Kyoto. The trouble was, no one seemed to know where, or for that matter what, Izuu was.
I’d been reading about the history of sushi. Some believe it came to Japan from Thailand, from the Mekong Delta, where locals have, for more centuries than anyone knows, used cooked rice to pack and preserve fish. The alcohol and acids created when the rice starts to go moldy kill off any bacteria in the fish, which means it can be kept for months. The fish itself is rendered a stinking mush, but at least it won’t kill you, and besides, decomposing fish is not to be sniffed at: from the Roman sauce garum, made from rotting anchovies, to modern-day Vietnamese muoc mam and other related fish sauces from Southeast Asia, fermented fish create what we now recognize as powerfully umami-packed flavors. From Thailand, the practice of preserving fish in rice spread to China, where it appears ultimately not to have caught on, but then, in the eighth century, it traveled to Japan.
Here, possibly around Lake Biwa, close to Kyoto, locals discovered that the lactic fermentation of the rice added a pleasantly acidic touch to their muddy-flavored freshwater fish. The dish was called nare-zushi (the z and s in sushi seem to be interchangeable) and can still be enjoyed in the villages close to the lake, where these days it is called funa-zushi. Funa are carp, which in this case are pickled with rice during spawning time, their eggs still in situ, and left for six months before the rice is discarded. The dish is sometimes referred to as “Japanese fish cheese” and, I’d guess, is one of those acquired tastes few rush to acquire. After some years enjoying nare-zushi, the Japanese decided that they couldn’t wait for the lactic process to run its course, and at some point in the fifteenth century, they started to eat the fish earlier, discovering that the rice—previously too rotten to eat—tasted rather good.
The next step in sushi’s development came with the discovery of rice vinegar, in the seventeenth century. Rice vinegar allowed cooks to add tanginess to the rice without having to wait for it to ferment. This they called haya-zushi, or “quick sushi,” which they made using stones to press the fish on top of rice in a large box, before cutting the resulting “cake” into smaller rectangular pieces.
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Tokyo, then called Edo, had usurped Kyoto as the capital of Japan, becoming the largest, most populous city on earth in the process. A series of fires, however, threatened the future of the world’s first conurbation, and so open flames were banned in restaurants, and the city’s burgeoning fast-food industry was virtually wiped out overnight. To the rescue came sushi, which could be assembled without need of a flame. Of course, the fish served with sushi in those days was unlikely to have been raw—there being no refrigeration—but it was a simple matter for sushi chefs to lightly poach, pickle, or grill their fish before bringing it into the city to add to the vinegared rice.
Tokyo’s nineteenth-century workers, much like their descendants today, were time-poor. Noren, the curtains that traditionally hang at the entrance to sushi restaurants, date from this time, for example, and were originally there for customers to wipe their hands on as they hurried in and out, an especially filthy noren being a sign of a good restaurant. Even back then, customers demanded to be fed in double-quick time, and so, in the late nineteenth century, a local Edo chef called Yohei Hanaya came up with the idea of squeezing the rice into blocks by hand and topping them with fish as the orders came in. Nigiri means “to squeeze”; sushi refers to the vinegared rice—it has, as I’m sure you know, nothing to do with raw fish; and thus nigiri sushi, sometimes still referred to as “Edomae sushi,” after its home city, was born.
Meanwhile, back in Kyoto, one of the great schisms of Japanese cuisine was unfolding. As well as deciding to put more sugar in the sushi rice than Tokyo chefs do—as we also tend to do in the West—Kyotoites had developed their own type of “pressed” sushi, not unlike the original haya-zushi. When making this so-called saba-zushi—or pressed mackerel sushi—they took this usually highly perishable fish and first briefly salt-cured it, then lightly pickled it in sugared vinegar, placed it on top of some rice, and wrapped the lot in simmered konbu before packing it in foot-long bamboo logs. As with ceviche, the acid in the vinegar slightly “cooked” the mackerel, which was useful in a landlocked city half a day’s journey from the sea.
But while nigiri and maki conquered the world, saba-zushi, and its Osakan cousin, oshi-zushi—a similar kind of pressed sushi made in cedar boxes—remained local delicacies only, slowly declining in popularity even in their home cities as the invention of refrigeration negated the need to pickle fish to preserve it.
It was this pressed, heavily vinegared saba-zushi I was in search of—the historic, hard-core übersushi, if you like. The most famous saba-zushi restaurant in Kyoto is Izuu, which opened in 1781. It’s still there: a small wooden-beamed building, both windowless and nameless. Having finally found it, I parted the clean, white noren and effectively time-traveled two centuries.
Inside, the restaurant looked like something from feudal-era Kyoto with rough wooden furniture, paper screens, and a slate floor. A heavily made-up lady in a kimono sat in a booth on the left and gestured that I should take a table. The only other diners were an aged Japanese couple, who stopped eating and eyed me suspiciously as I bowed and smiled my way to my table.
My saba-zushi arrived on a blue-patterned porcelain plate. It was a sizable cross-sliced log, almost a foot long, of densely packed rice topped with mackerel and wrapped in glistening, dark green konbu. There was no soy or wasabi. Saba-zushi is eaten unadorned, all the better to appreciate the acidic rice and delicate, oily fish. This makes sense. Soy would be too heavy a flavor to compete; wasabi too much of a challenge to a palate already coping with the vinegar. The rice was the star of the dish—it was the finest-quality short-grain rice, each grain as wide as it was long, probably koshihikari, soft on the outside with a slightly resistant core to give bite, glinting and lucent. The fish was excellent, too, a muted rainbow ranging from pale rose to deep purple to light brown.
I had a misunderstanding with the elderly waitress/cashier at this point. At first, I thought she was gesturing at me from her kiosk not to eat the soft konbu the sushi had been wrapped in. Then, when she saw I was leaving it on the side of my plate, she seemed to be encouraging me to eat it. I looked over to the elderly couple, who instantly averted what had until that moment been a fixed gaze in my direction. By now they were sipping their tea, and I noticed all their konbu was gone. I ate some of mine. It was leathery and sticky, a bit like eating flypaper, although I am sure very healthy.
I have to say, saba-zushi was pretty fantastic—sweeter, more vinegary, and more fishy in a nice way than conventional nigiri. It had been a fairly filling lunch, but I was still hungry and, not for the first time in Japan (or elsewhere, come to that), alone and without Lissen to rein in my gluttony, I had thought I might try to squeeze in a second lunch that day. I had something in mind, just a little snack, really.
Kyoto is the undisputed tofu capital of Japan, and Toshi had warned me that I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t eat in a local tofu restaurant.
Until the seventeenth century, tofu was a luxury dish enjoyed mainly by noblemen, which is odd, as it is a relatively simple food, made from cheap ingredients. You soak soybeans overnight, then boil them and press their milk out. To the milk a coagulant of some kind is added—magnesium chloride, which the Japanese call nigari; or magnesium sulfate, better known as Epsom salts; or calcium sulphate, also known as gypsum, and particularly rich in calcium. The liquid is then poured into cheesecloth-lined molds to set.
Tofu is rich, not just in protein from the soybeans (pound for pound it has more protein than meat, in fact) but also iron, vitamins B1 and E, zinc, potassium, magnesium, and calcium. It is said to lower blood pressure, slow the aging process, and be good for one’s bones. It also contains oligosaccharides, a type of simple sugar that is excellent for promoting healthy bacteria in the gut, preventing constipation, and lowering blood pressure.
Depending on how finely the tofu is strained, and whether or not it is pressed, the result is either momen-dofu, or “cotton tofu,” which is firm and stands up better to cooking, or the finer, lighter kinugoshi-dofu, or “silk tofu”—a slight misnomer, as it isn’t actually strained through silk. According to Shizuo Tsuji, if you can’t get hold of tofu, then “calves’ brains are remarkably similar.” He’s right, in a way, at least in terms of texture; good-quality sweetbreads have something of the same loose jelly density, and melt-in-the-mouth texture, but the flavors are hardly comparable.
As with the sake, the tofu is especially good in Kyoto thanks to the city’s endless supply of fresh, soft mountain water—the quality of the water used in its making being the most important determinant of good tofu. Close to the famous Nanzen-ji shrine, on the very eastern edge of the city, where majestic, swoopy-roofed temples emerge from the forested hills, is one of the city’s most famous tofu restaurants, Okutan, housed in a large, wooden thatched hall, dating back over three and a half centuries and surrounded by customarily serene gardens. I left my shoes in the rack outside and was shown to a place on the tatami floor by a low table. The restaurant, which was full even this late in the lunch service, serves only tofu dishes, so I ordered their classic tofu hot pot and some dengaku. The hot pot arrived within a couple of minutes, piping hot and featuring luscious cubes of tofu, the texture of crème caramel and served with small side dishes of spring onion, ginger, and soy. Picking ectoplasmic tofu from a cauldron of hot water is surely the ultimate test of chopstick technique, and I must say, as I glanced in embarrassment around the room, I could see a number of Japanese people were struggling, too.
The dengaku was easier to handle. In this dish, tofu is skewered on double-pronged wooden skewers—the name comes from the Japanese for “stilt-walker,” whose legs the skewers evoke—coated with white miso and grilled. The fresh, clean tofu is the perfect foil for the fruity, nutty, salty miso. Actually, tofu is the perfect foil for all sorts of assertive flavors, although a little fine-grated ginger, spring onion, or katsuobushi is all the dressing you need for really good, fresh tofu, served chilled in summer.
The golden rule with tofu is that it must be eaten the day it is made; otherwise, the flavor turns stale. This, I think, explains the bad rap tofu has in the West, where it is often a cheap punch line for hippie jokes: flavorless piety food for sanctimonious vegans. It perhaps also explains tofu’s declining popularity in Japan, where small, local tofu makers have been going out of business over the last few years. Tofu used to be delivered to households daily, as milk once was in the U.S. and the UK, but that tradition has been lost in most cities. If I had my way, and if we could guarantee it always tasted as good as Kyoto tofu, fresh deliveries of soybean curd would be introduced to every street in every town.