Conclusion

After the Fantasies

 

 

Sashimi, tempura, and sushi are foods associated with Japanese cuisine found in restaurants worldwide today, and this book has touched on the history of these dishes. But there is more to the history of Japanese cuisine than the stories of just a few representative dishes or even a few esoteric ones like crane soup. Chapter 3 includes the earliest recipe for sashimi, from the 1489 culinary text Shij School Text on Food Preparation. In the period before soy sauce became the usual accompaniment to sashimi, that recipe listed only varieties of vinegar dressing to be used with different fish. Sashimi was a simplified version of a “fish salad” (namasu), a blend of diced seafood and vegetables usually served with vinegar dressing, and a requisite dish for the main tray (honzen) at banquets in medieval times. Chapter 4 mentions the difficulties in tracing the history of tempura, which is believed to have its origins in a Portuguese dish. The Southern Barbarians’ Cookbook, which probably dates to the early 1600s, and which contains mostly Iberian recipes—the focus of that chapter—lacks a recipe for tempura but includes one for tenpurari, a type of fried chicken. That chapter explains that, in the 1600s, tempura first referred to an oil-fried fish dish served in a broth, and that, by the second half of the eighteenth century, the word tempura was used in reference to a batter-fried fish dish that became a popular fast food sold at stands. The latter has become known in Japanese restaurants worldwide today as “tempura,” but the earlier dish is practically unknown, except to culinary historians. Simmering and grilling were methods of cooking familiar to medieval chefs called hchnin, who worked for the military and imperial elite, and these methods remain central to preparing Japanese food. Other cooking techniques and ingredients, like baking and working with sugar, were adapted from Iberian foodways in the sixteenth century. These methods were improved upon in the early modern period but, in Japan, largely remained the provenance of professional bakers and confectioners.

As fascinating as these histories of individual dishes are, what defines cuisine is not necessarily a particular dish or a style of cooking, although these are important; rather, a cuisine, according to the approach used in this book, is a way to conceptualize food. Cuisine is an association of food with the imaginary, what I have called a fantasy with food. In the case of modern Japanese cuisine, sushi, tempura, and sashimi are identified with a national cuisine, and this cuisine “stands for an imagined national identity and cultural homogeneity.”1 For early modern Japan, before the rise of a modern nation, such identifications did not exist. This might mean that Japanese cuisine itself did not exist. On one level that is correct, because there was no single homogenous Japanese cuisine. Diners did not yet conceive of food in that way, and the terms for Japanese cuisine (washoku and Nihon ryri) did not appear until the late nineteenth century, after the early modern period ended. However, as this book demonstrates, this does not mean that people in medieval and early modern Japan did not think imaginatively about food or view it as an art or create fantasy recipes and banquets. They did all these things, and these fantasies with food must be taken into account when we consider the rise of modern Japanese cuisine. In other words, not only were certain dishes and cooking techniques that developed in early modern Japan influential components in determining a modern cuisine, but so too were several centuries of creative thinking about the various meanings of food preparation and consumption.

The culinary culture of premodern Japan was indeed rich, as is evident from writings by medieval hchnin and the culinary books of early modern gastronomes. It borrowed from ancient customs that used food as religious offerings, Buddhism, five-element theory, and Daoism, to name a few sources. It evoked other arts through homage to great poets, whose names adorned dishes, and like these arts it referenced seasonal, meteorological, and topographic features. Moreover, it provided an escape from the realities of the early modern world, as sumptuary rules, income, and one’s birth status—not to mention a rather humdrum diet—did not hinder readers from appreciating the imaginative menus and dishes found in published culinary books. Indeed, these factors provided incentives to seek gastronomic escapism in the world of culinary books and explain why so many were published.

Cookbooks, like plays and novels, present ideals, not direct reflections of reality. Playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon stated that “art is something which lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal.” This applies to the approach to cuisine in the culinary books of early modern Japan, and it is especially apt when considering the work of Chikamatsu’s contemporary End Genkan.2 End’s Guide to Meals for the Tea Ceremony, examined in chapter 6, presents minute directions for a banquet realistic but so complicated and expensive that it would be impossible for his readers to achieve, except in their dreams. Even the author admits that he was never witness to such a banquet firsthand but had to piece his narrative together from secondhand accounts. Later authors of published menu collections may not have been as detail-oriented as End Genkan, but they embraced his idea that cuisine may begin with the reality of preparing food, but should not prevent one from imagining more complex banquets and fanciful dishes. These remained plausible because they participated in the same culinary system of meaning. This idea enabled authors of menu collections to include any number of rare dishes in their descriptions of elite banquets, creating a type of gastronomic voyeurism for their readers without having to worry about whether such ingredients were available, affordable, seasonal, or legal for them to use.

An equally creative exercise on a smaller scale is demonstrated in recipe collections described in chapter 7 that featured inventive dishes with evocative names: Deep Thought Wheat Gluten, Solid Gold Soup, and Cold Dish from Sendai are a few examples from Delicacies from the Mountains and Seas, published in 1750. A similar approach to creative naming allowed comic novelist Jippensha Ikku to write an entertaining book about sweet making, but one that was impractical for use due to its problematic directions. This practice of giving fanciful appellations to food had yet another important dimension. The custom of creatively named dishes helped expand and sustain the confectionery business beginning in the late seventeenth century because hundreds of different sweets could be created from the same few ingredients as long as they were given different, inspired names and slightly different shapes and colors. As one modern confectioner noted, a lyrical name gives meaning to the sweet, turning what might otherwise be a lump of rice flour and sugar into a work of art.

Compared to modern associations of food with nationalism, early modern culinary fantasies did not assume uniformity, but were whimsical, individualistic, occult, and heterogeneous. On the one hand, they assumed status differences by reaffirming the sumptuary laws of the hegemonic military regime that restricted certain foods and table settings to elite status groups. On the other hand, the medium of print made descriptions of these styles of dining and food available to a much wider audience, making knowledge about these forms more egalitarian and inviting readers to imagine alternative realities where they too might consume these delectables.

This diversity may supply the reason why previous studies of foodways have ignored the culinary rules in early modern Japan, whose different messages were so divergent from the singular nationalism of modern Japanese cuisine. When food was mobilized into larger categories of signification to serve the nation, the individualistic and local meanings—especially the more mystical and poetic ones—were, if not lost completely, then at least drowned out by the drumbeat of nationalism. For instance, sushi and sashimi describe ways of preparing fish and are synonymous with modern Japanese cuisine, but the dish Deep Thought Wheat Gluten, which appears in several early modern culinary books, offers an invitation to contemplate food without policing what one had to think about. Yet the transition from early modern ways of fantasizing with food to modern nationalism did not happen overnight; it has been a slow but ongoing process over the course of the last century that merits further study. As anthropologist Ted Bestor has noted, “A homogenized national fare has gradually replaced regionally varied ones, which were based on traditional foodstuffs and locally idiosyncratic techniques of preparation.”3 It will be the task of future researchers to tease apart these local and traditional approaches to food to see how they maintain, and how they blend, earlier ideas about cuisine with modern ones.

Fortunately, the magic of food that delighted early modern diners has not completely disappeared in the twenty-first century. Many restaurants in Japan still place small piles of salt on their thresholds for good luck. These “servings of salt” (morijio) are said to be a charm to attract customers that is based on an ancient Chinese custom.⁴ They also preserve the medieval Japanese banquet practice of “high servings” (takamori), in which delicacies were served to guests in cones, a form similar to the way food was presented as a religious offering to divinities and Buddhas at shrines and temples. This mode of serving signified that the dish was meant to be viewed as symbolic nourishment but not eaten. In another example, traditional New Year’s meals (osechi ryri) that are still popular in Japan feature several boxes filled with various prepared foods that signify good fortune, like the snacks served at ceremonial drinking rites (shikisankon) before medieval and early modern banquets, described in chapter 3. In the modern New Year’s meal, shrimp and abalone evoke longevity. Red and white fish cakes have auspicious colors. Sardines signify abundance. And the word used for herring roe—kazunoko—suggests that one will have “plenty of children.”

At the new year, households may also create or purchase decorative Mirror Rice Cakes (kagami mochi) for display in an alcove or on a home shrine, as has been the custom since the early modern period. Two large, circular rice cakes resting on leaves of konbu seaweed topped with a bitter orange (daidai) constitute the basic configuration for kagami mochi, but local and personal preferences vary; and persimmons, spiny lobster, dried chestnuts, and other ingredients that have a long history of ceremonial use are sometimes added. Today, after the rice cakes serve their function as offerings, they may be broken apart—it is bad luck to cut them—and then boiled or pulverized for eating.⁵ In a modern world where food is usually reduced to its caloric, nutritional, and fat content as on a product label, seasonal observances such as these help to preserve premodern associations of certain foods with magical properties that can be manipulated by knowledgeable practitioners for beneficial results.

Sushi, now available even in the student food-courts at the University of Kansas, may well be the poster child for traditional Japanese cuisine that has gone global in the modern age. Ironically, the success of the dish today may not owe much to its associations with Japanese cuisine. Some consumers might like it simply for its taste or because it seems healthier than a double cheeseburger with bacon. But when the aesthetics of sushi are contemplated, or its associations with Japanese culture come into consideration, then we have undeniably entered the realm of cuisine, which is as much an intellectual and aesthetic sphere—as this book has demonstrated—as it is a world of serving styles and cooking techniques. Where sushi today may evoke “Japanese culture,” a homogenous food tradition expressing a national identity, in early modern Japan it would have been difficult to find an equivalent dish that carried as much symbolic weight. Pride of place at a warrior banquet would be given to a game bird or large carp, perhaps uneaten but carved in an elaborate ceremony before the banquet, as described in chapter 2. Soups were central to banqueting at all levels of society, for their number determined the level of complexity of the meal and they served as foils for a number of side dishes served alongside them. Therefore, in banquets in medieval and early modern Japan, sushi would have been only one among many dishes, and it would not have been the most prominent one.

To medieval and early modern diners, more important than sushi or any other single dish were the ways foods could be combined, how they were served, how they might or might not be consumed, and how they might be individually named by cooking technique, by ingredient, or by a more whimsical designation that evoked a range of poetic associations. While as a consumer I have to admit that I still marvel at the availability of sushi in a university cafeteria in the American Midwest, as a historian I feel a sense of loss that the magical and playful world of cuisine in early modern Japan that evoked religious and artistic sentiments—often simultaneously—that participated in larger cultural discourses, that offered a window into the world of the elite as described in early modern culinary books, and that demanded a great deal of imagination to be fully appreciated has now grown remote to us, even as packaged sushi has become so readily available. Even with the obligatory piece of thin, green decorative plastic included in the container, the prosaic “California sushi roll” cannot fully reap the benefits of this historical legacy, but it is still evidence that fantasizing with food continues at some level at least.