CHAPTER 4
The Barbarians’ Cookbook
The culinary texts (ry
risho) by men of the the carving knife (hchnin) referenced thus far remained the dominant form of culinary writing until the mid-seventeenth century. These writings never lost their importance in the Edo period, because they provided information about cutting rituals (shikibch) and ceremonial banqueting (shikish ryri) that continued to be important to the employers of hchnin—the military elite and imperial aristocracy. Yet after the publication of the first culinary book (ryribon), Tales of Cookery (Ryri monogatari) in 1643, culinary texts by hchnin were no longer the sole writings on cuisine in circulation. In fact, since nearly all culinary texts by hchnin remained in manuscript form until the modern period, it would be more accurate to recognize that culinary books like Tales of Cookery were actually the first popular writings on cuisine and signaled the popularization of elite modes of dining and the broadening of the authorship, readership, and subject matter of culinary texts, to name several important developments.
But before we leave the world of culinary manuscripts behind to examine published culinary books, one more text deserves mentioning because it speaks to important changes in Japan’s foodways in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the era of transition in these two genres of culinary writing. Southern Barbarians’ Cookbook (Nanban ryrisho, hereafter Barbarians’ Cookbook) is a manuscript that was written in the seventeenth century, if not earlier, and not published in the Edo period.1 In that regard it is similar to culinary texts by hchnin, and it may have been authored by one. On the other hand, characteristics of Barbarians’ Cookbook foreshadow many of those of published culinary books. It introduces new ingredients, methods of preparation, and nomenclature not found in the culinary texts of hchnin and, at the same time, ignores the chief focus of these works on cutting rituals and ceremonial cuisine.
Nevertheless, the foreignness of this work sets it apart from these other genres because Barbarians’ Cookbook is a collection of Portuguese and Spanish recipes, making it unique among premodern culinary writings in Japan. Accordingly, Barbarians’ Cookbook offers insight into historical developments outside of cooking, such as the impact of Iberian culture on Japan that began with the arrival of the Portuguese in 1543 and extended beyond their prohibition from the country by 1639. The ability of Japan to regulate its foreign relations was one result of the creation of a stable hegemonic military regime, the Tokugawa bakufu, whose establishment in 1603 finally ended the long period of Warring States (1467–1573) and the battles of unification of the final decades of the sixteenth century. The founding of the Tokugawa regime ushered in an era of peace that allowed for the growth of cities and the creation of a distinct urban culture, which included a thriving publishing industry that produced hundreds of culinary books.2
Barbarians’ Cookbook is the missing link in the transition from culinary texts to culinary books; it is also a document revealing broader developments in foodways in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Barbarians’ Cookbook reveals the introduction of new ingredients, cooking techniques, and dishes that would reshape the Japanese diet. Sugar candies and baking, to cite two examples, did not make an appearance in culinary texts before the Edo period, but they were fundamental to recipes in Barbarians’ Cookbook and in Edo-period culinary books thereafter, especially works on confectionery. In addition to introducing these new ingredients, Barbarians’ Cookbook indicates a shift in attitude toward foods like chicken and eggs, which were well known in Japan but considered taboo as foods, at least among the upper classes, before the Edo period. Barbarians’ Cookbook uses chicken and eggs to create dishes new to Japan, many of which, like the sponge cake (kasutera), and a chicken-and-rice dish called Southern Barbarian Dish (nanban ryri), became household names and were frequently included in culinary books in the period.
As the example of Southern Barbarian Dish illustrates, Barbarians’ Cookbook offered new ways to describe recipes, by giving dishes evocative names. This development shows that foods and cooking methods were made to signify in new ways, marking a watershed in the development of cuisine as foods were seen through new intellectual and artistic lenses. In sum, Barbarians’ Cookbook may not have been widely circulated until modern times, but it offers a chance to examine the links and the gaps between the elite medieval culinary world and the developing popular trends in the Edo period in terms of ingredients (food) and thinking about food (fantasy). Before examining the book’s significance in this regard, we must closely study the text itself, a full translation of which is included as an appendix.
THE MYSTERIOUS END AND BEGINNING
OF BARBARIANS ‘ COOK BOOK
The colophon at the end of Barbarians’ Cookbook and the title at the beginning provide few clues about the history of the text. The colophon lacks a date but lists the names of two people, Morita Shir
Uemon, who is presumably the author or copyist, and Tanaka Sahye, apparently the work’s recipient. These individuals may be hchnin, but they remain to be identified.3 The title on the oldest extant version of the manuscript, a copy dating from the late Edo period in the Kan Collection of Thoku University Library, is in a different hand than the manuscript itself.4 The Kan Collection is the former library of Kan Kkichi (1865–1942), a Meiji-era philosopher and educator, and Kan is likely the person who added the title to the text.
The choice of title seems appropriate to the work’s contents. Southern barbarian (nanban) was originally a derogatory term in Chinese used for the “southern islanders” from Southeast Asia. In Japan the word came to be used in reference to Europeans, especially Portuguese and Spanish merchants and missionaries, who landed first on Japan’s southern islands. Some scholars mark the date of their arrival in 1543 as the start of the “Christian century.” Estimates place the number of Japan’s converts to Christianity during the era of Iberian contact as high as three hundred thousand by 1600. But in the first three decades of the seventeenth century, the Tokugawa bakufu virtually eliminated Christianity, forcing converts to give up their faith, be exiled from Japan, or be put to death. It also prohibited the Spanish and Portuguese from its shores in 1624 and 1639, respectively.
Despite persecution, remnants of Iberian influence survived in Japan, as exemplified by the Spanish and Portuguese recipes contained in Barbarians’ Cookbook, some of which became increasingly popular over the course of the Edo period. Tempura, made from breaded fried shrimp and vegetables, is perhaps the most famous of these contributions to Japanese foodways, one available in Japanese restaurants worldwide today.5 While the recipe for tempura is not included in Barbarians’ Cookbook, there is a dish called tenpurari and several other recipes for sweets, like the yellow sponge Castilian Cake, kasutera. These dishes along with cookies (bro), the bumpy sugar-ball candy known as konpeit, and aruheit, a candy that can be molded into lozenges or more fanciful shapes, would became favorites in the Edo period and have not lost their popularity today.
The inclusion of these dishes and others demonstrating Iberian influence appears to date the period of compilation for Barbarians’ Cookbook to a time when the Japanese authors of the text could sample and learn how to prepare Portuguese and Spanish dishes firsthand, but before Japanese had adapted these dishes to their own taste. As we will see, a comparison of the recipes in Barbarians’ Cookbook with more technically advanced versions found in published culinary books of the Edo period provides evidence that dates the manuscript to, if not before the period of Iberian expulsion, then shortly afterward. However, this does not completely resolve questions about the work’s date of composition and authorship.
SWEETS IN THE BARBARIANS’ COOKBOOK
The Barbarians’ Cookbook is a collection of forty-five recipes without preface or additional commentary. This format is consistent with medieval culinary texts, which are simple listings of material without a table of contents. Later-published culinary books usually have a preface, table of contents, and other signposts that make them easier for readers to consult. Despite its similarities to earlier culinary texts, Barbarians Cookbook omits the cooking techniques typical of the medieval period: it does not feature recipes for fish and vegetable salads (namasu, aemono), simmered dishes (nimono), grilled dishes (yakimono), sashimi, and pickles (tsukemono) comparable to the ones found in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century culinary texts by hchnin.6 Instead, half the book is devoted to recipes for Iberian and Japanese confectionery, and the other half contains Iberian-inspired meat dishes and recipes for Japanese noodles and dumplings.
The first half of the book consists of twenty-seven recipes. This section lacks a header, but all of the recipes are for sweets. The first eighteen recipes are for sweets of Iberian origin or inspiration, as indicated by their foreign-sounding names written in phonetics.
Significantly, recipes such as haruteisu and oiriyasu are identified only by the phonetic versions of their foreign-sounding names. (I have provided a translation in brackets of the less familiar dishes.) The fact that the compiler of the cookbook did not supply translations for the names of these dishes indicates both a close degree of familiarity with them and the lack of a native equivalent.
The remaining confectionery recipes in Barbarians’ Cookbook are for “Japanese sweets”—confectionery that may have originated outside of Japan but had a history of several centuries in Japan before the arrival of Europeans.
The recipe for uir mochi, a gelatinous cake made from glutinous rice, contains the annotation that it is a “sweet for use in the tea ceremony” (sukiya kashi). The sweets that followed—five of which are variations on the recipe for uir mochi—were also served with tea in the late medieval and early modern periods, so the notation probably applies to them as well.7 All of these dishes predate the arrival of Europeans in Japan. Rice cakes wrapped in leaves (chimaki) date to as early as the Heian period, while uir, manj
, and ykan arrived from China in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods as tenshin, midday snacks for Buddhist monks.8
The Japanese sweets, in contrast to the Iberian ones, were made with little if any sugar, which was seldom used in cooking before the early modern period. Japanese knew about the existence of sugar by the eighth century, well before the arrival of Iberians; however, they did not use it for cooking and instead valued its medicinal properties.9 Sugar was not raised in Japan until the early modern period, so before then other sweeteners were occasionally used instead. As Ise Sadatake notes in Teij’s Miscellany (Teij zakki): “Long ago when there was no sugar, all sweets were sweetened with something called sweet arrowroot (amazura).” He says of sweet arrowroot that it is “a viny plant. Concocting an infusion of the leaves and turning it into a syrup makes something like a thick malt syrup that will sweeten any foods it is mixed with.”10 Besides amazura, rice glucose (mizu ame) and honey were used as sweeteners in Japan.11
The recipes for “sweets for the tea ceremony” in Barbarians’ Cookbook indicate that the text was written at a time when sweets (kashi) were only beginning to become synonymous with sugary confectionery. The Jesuit Portuguese-Japanese dictionary Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam (Nippo jisho), published in Nagasaki in 1603, describes “sweets,” or kashi—written as quaxi in this dictionary—as fruit eaten after a meal.12 Other foods besides fruits were served after meals to accompany tea, but these were not usually sweets in the modern sense of the word. For example, two trays of “snacks for tea” (cha no ko) are listed in Culinary Text of the Yamanouchi House (Yamanouchi ryrisho) dating to 1497, but only one of these snacks is sweetened, namely, thin slices of gelatin served in rice glucose (mizu ame), found on the first tray. Other snacks on that tray are oysters on skewers, seaweed, and chestnuts; while the second tray holds dried devil’s tongue (kon’yaku), fermented soybeans (natto), wheat gluten, konbu seaweed, and kumquat (kinkan).13 Tea master Sen no Riky
(1522–91) most often used wheat gluten, chestnuts, sardines, and konbu seaweed as “sweets” to accompany his teas. The sweets served most frequently in the tea ceremony record titled Matsuya’s Record of Gatherings (Matsuya kaiki, 1604–50) were chestnuts, gingko nuts, tangerines, persimmons, sugared ykan, rice cakes, octopus, abalone, sweet potato, and wheat gluten.14 The late-seventeenth-century culinary book Assembly of Standard Cookery Writings (Grui nichiy ryrish), published in 1689, contains a remarkably similar list of tea sweets, which combined fruits with savory rather than sweet dishes: pear, rice cake wrapped in camellia leaf (tsubaki mochi), grilled rice cake (yaki mochi), yam (yama no imo), arrowhead (kuwai), “preserves in honey” (mitsuzuke), shiitake mushrooms, citron-flavored steamed dumpling (yubeshi), grilled wheat gluten (fu no yaki), manj, taro, and chimaki.15 In short, the fact that uir and five of its variations are listed as “sweets for tea” in Barbarians’ Cookbook, but are not made with any sugar, is congruent with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century idea that “tea sweets” were unsweetened snacks.16 These sweets could still be served with great style, as they were to Emperor Gomizuno’o in a famous banquet in 1626 (see plate 7).
Nevertheless, Barbarians’ Cookbook also foreshadows the sweetening of Japanese confectionery in its use of sugar in recipes for two traditional favorites: stuffed buns (manj) and ykan. Ise Sadatake understood this history, stating that ykan and manj were once sugarless snacks, not sweets.
Today, manj may be synonymous with buns stuffed with sweet adzuki bean, but before the Edo period they had many different fillings, including vegetables.18 Modern ykan is made from sweet, jellied adzuki bean paste and agar agar (kanten) or kudzu starch, but when this dish arrived in Japan from China, it was a vegetarian substitute for mutton soup, as indicated by its name written using the Chinese character y, meaning “sheep,” and the word kan for “soup.”19 Up to the late seventeenth century, if sugar was added to these recipes, they were called sugar manj (sat manj) and sugar ykan (sat ykan) to designate a special added ingredient.20 It was not until the 1680s, when the word kashi had become synonymous with sugary treats, that the designation sugar was dropped from manj and ykan, a change in meaning that coincided with the rise of the confectionery business in Japan and the increased importation and consumption of sugar.21
In contrast to the use of little or no sugar in the Japanese sweets included in the Barbarians’ Cookbook, the use of large amounts of refined sugar characterizes the Iberian sweets, evoking the close connection between the Portuguese and the sugar trade at the turn of the seventeenth century.22 The recipes for kasutera and caramels each require six hundred grams of refined sugar in equal proportion to the flour used. Before the first three decades of the seventeenth century, when Japanese had yet to refine their own sugar, white sugar would have been imported, initially from Iberian traders and later from the Dutch and Chinese merchants who replaced them.23 This was an extremely profitable trade for the Portuguese, who in the same period also controlled the sugar market in Europe, producing sugar on Brazilian plantations and other colonies. In the late sixteenth century, Portuguese in Nagasaki purchased white sugar in Canton and resold it for two to three times the original price. Brown sugar was ten times more profitable for them.24 This made sugar an expensive commodity for Japanese consumers. In the early seventeenth century, the amount of refined sugar needed to create the kasutera recipe in Barbarians’ Cookbook cost 6.5 ry, approximately twenty-five to thirty-six times the cost of an equal amount of rice.25 Not only did Portuguese dominate sugar production and trade globally around 1600, but they were also leaders in the use of sugar in confectionery. Scholar Eddy Stols comments, “More than others, the people in Portugal, Andalusia, and other Spanish regions developed and maintained surprising ingeniousness and an almost disturbing creativity to vary and differentiate their sweets in all forms and colors and under the most evocative names.”26 Thus the Portuguese traders who brought sugar were also expert in how to use it, and they transmitted their art to Japanese.
Japanese who wanted to learn how to make the Portuguese sweets konpeit, aruheit, and caramels would need to master the tricky art of candy making, and Barbarian’s Cookbook provides useful advice. The first challenge was learning how to heat sugar with a little water to make a syrup without having it crystallize, which could turn a promising syrup “with lightning speed into a grainy mass,” ruining it for candy making, as one modern cookbook warns.27 The recipe for hard candy, konpeit, in Barbarians’ Cookbook cautions readers to heat the sugar until just before it crystallizes.
Barbarians’ Cookbook advises readers to remove crystals and other impurities in sugar syrup by adding egg whites, as the recipe for the soft candy aruheit describes: “Add the whites from two eggs to one kin [600 grams] of white sugar. Add one cup of water and beat together. Then, bring it to a boil, strain the liquid, and boil again.”29 Tales of Cookery clarifies this point in its directions: “For making a syrup, stir up an egg and mix it in. All the sugar crystals will adhere to this [egg] and can be removed.”30 Tricks like these helped candy makers avoid ruining syrups that had heated too quickly.
Other recipes in Barbarians’ Cookbook provide clues to the candy maker on how to judge the correct temperature of the syrup for different types of candy. The higher the temperature of the syrup, the more concentrated the sugar becomes, and the harder and more brittle the resulting candy. The recipe for aruheit indicates that one should “boil until the mix would harden when added to water but would still be pliable.” This passage directs the chef to perform the “cold water test,” used to judge when a syrup has reached the correct temperature. The candy maker drops a dollop of syrup in cold water and measures the hardness and consistency of it after it has cooled.31 The syrup turns into a thread at 230 degrees; it can be shaped into a soft ball at 250 degrees, and a hard ball at 260 degrees. At 275 degrees, the syrup forms a mass that cracks when bent; and at 300 degrees, the syrup creates hard-crack candy the consistency of a sucker.32 Thus, the pliable aruheit would be ready at a lower temperature than konpeit, while a hard-crack candy like the caramels (karumeira) required an even higher temperature. Without a modern thermometer, the cold-water test and experience were essential in making these candies successfully.
Besides sugar, another ingredient that distinguished Iberian-inspired foods in Barbarians’ Cookbook from earlier Japanese dishes was eggs.33 Culinary historians Harada Nobuo and Kumakura Isao contend that eggs and chicken were not part of the Japanese diet until the latter part of the sixteenth century.34 The reasons for this conclusion are unclear, and it seems to be based largely on negative evidence of egg and chicken dishes in culinary texts (ryrisho) and menus, which are records of only the elite foodways.35 In contrast, eggs are essential to create the recipes in Barbarians’ Cookbook. The directions for kasutera and for the bread called oiriyasu call for ten eggs each. The recipe for the pastry kesachiina requires egg yolk as a binder and a dough lightener. In the next section of the cookbook, eggs are used as a sauce in the recipe Shredded Chicken and are prepared as a stuffing for Boneless Chicken Roll. The text also has several recipes that feature eggs as the main ingredient: sweet Egg Noodles, which are yolks drizzled over syrup, known today as keiran smen, and Egg Tofu, eggs scrambled with soy sauce and sake.36
With these prominent recipes, Barbarians’ Cookbook foreshadows the culinary books of the Edo period that reveal a growing fascination with egg dishes and suggest a popularization of egg consumption. Tales of Cookery (1643) lists several recipes for chicken eggs: “Egg Drop Soup [fuwafuwa], Grilled Wheat Gluten [fu no yaki], Sunny-Side Soup [mi no ni], Hard Boiled [maruni], Terrine [kamaboko], Smen Noodles, Dressing [nerizake], and other various uses.”37 In case some diners still wondered if eggs were safe to eat, the Complete Manual of Cuisine of Our School (Try setsuy ryri taizen) touted their medicinal value in 1714:
Eggs were valuable for their medicinal properties for some ailments, but their versatility as an ingredient was almost unparalleled, according to late-eighteenth-century culinary books. The year 1785 witnessed the publication of two books that celebrated manifold culinary uses for egg: A Secret Box of Ten Thousand Culinary Treasures (Manp ryri himitsu bako) and A Collection of Menus of Ten Thousand Treasures (Manp ryri kondatesh). Both works are by an author who published under the name Kidod (n.d.). Little is known about him except that he dominated a new genre of cookbook, the so-called hundred-tricks texts that showcased different ways of preparing singular ingredients. This genre began with the publication of One Hundred Tricks with Tofu (Tfu hyakuchin) in 1782.39 Part one of A Secret Box of Ten Thousand Culinary Treasures covers chicken recipes and river fish, and the remainder of the text is egg recipes. In total this work contains 103 egg recipes, surpassing the amount suggested in the work’s alternative title, One Hundred Tricks with Eggs (Tamago hyakuchin). Some of the names of the dishes derive from the ingredients added to the eggs or their method of preparation: Egg Simmer with Matsutake Mushrooms and Egg, Salad with Egg and Herring Roe (kazunoko tamago ae), Egg Crackers (tamago senbei), Egg with Miso Sauce (tamago dengaku), and Egg Pickles (tamago no k no mono). Other names for dishes are fanciful: Eggs Genji (Genji tamago), Eggs Riky (Riky tamago), and Eggs Teika (Teika tamago) are named after the famous warrior clan, the noted tea master, and the Kamakura-period poet, respectively. Individually, the recipes are interesting, but as a group they form an encyclopedia of egg cookery. Kidod’s second book on eggs, A Collection of Menus of Ten Thousand Treasures, contains not only menus that feature egg dishes but also information about other ingredients that go well with eggs.
Cookery books like these tell us what people could eat, not what they actually ate; egg consumption was hardly regular or universal in the Edo period. Recipes that include eggs are found in Edo-period culinary books, but these works are directed toward a wealthy urban audience. Conversely, egg dishes are absent from the 119 recipes in a more practical guide to cooking, Record of a Year’s Dishes (Nench bansairoku), published in 1849.40 By the end of the Edo period, daimyo of the Date house in Sendai domain may have eaten eggs every day, but a lower-level samurai living in the same period, Ozaki Junnosuke Sadamiki, who left a meticulous diary of his meals called Sekij’s Diary (Sekij nikki), recorded eating only an egg a week.41
As with egg dishes, it took time for sugary sweets to fully enter the diet in the Edo period, because of both the high cost of sugar, as noted earlier, and the association of “southern barbarian sweets” with the outlawed religion Christianity.42 From the time when the foreign missionaries arrived, until around 1580, the language barrier forced them to use symbols and rituals to convey Christian messages to Japanese audiences, and sweets were among the presents given to Japanese to interest them in the new religion.43 Nanbangashi, the word for “southern barbarian sweets,” first appears in the written record in 1608 in the documents of Satsuma domain, Sabban kyki zatsuroku, in Kyushu, describing how a foreign priest (pateren) brought sake and southern barbarian sweets as a New Year’s offering.44 Years earlier, in 1569, the Portuguese Jesuit Lois Frois (d. 1597) had visited the building site of Nij Castle in Kyoto, where he presented Oda Nobunaga with a glass jar containing the hard candy konpeit.45 One story identifies the first Japanese to make kasutera as Maruyama Tan (1566–1619), who took the Christian name Antoniyo. Tan lived in Nagasaki, a port administered by Jesuits from 1580 to 1588, until warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi took control of it. Tan is said to have opened a store in 1587, where he sold a sweet called kasutera Tan, a treat he presented to both Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu.46 Although there are no religious references in the Barbarians’ Cookbook, the connection between sugary treats and Christian proselytizing was clear to Oze Hoan (d. 1640), author of Chronicle of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (Taikki), published in 1626. In response to the question posed to himself in the introduction of this text—“What foul things have foreign priests [pateren] done to Japanese converts?”—Oze offers a scornful response:
Oze was not alone in his distrust of foreign missionaries. Taikki was written in an era of persecution of Christians, published four years after the bakufu executed fifty-five Christians in Nagasaki. Significantly, all of the sweets mentioned appear in Barbarians’ Cookbook, but simply as foods, not as Christian symbols. Consciously avoiding past associations with Christianity allowed these sweets to continue to be enjoyed in Japan long after Christianity was banned and Iberians barred from the country.
The Western and Christian associations of some sweets did prompt efforts to reinvent their origins, if novelist Ihara Saikaku (1642–93) is to be believed. He offered a Chinese origin story for konpeit in Japanese Family Storehouse (Nippon eitaigura) published in 1688. Saikaku explains how a Japanese merchant discovered the secret to making konpeit from the Chinese, and how he sold the sweet until ordinary housewives learned to make it themselves.48 The comedic storybook (kokkeibon) Pack of Lies (usonarubeshi), published in 1834, includes a more outlandish origin story about two other nanban sweets and their creators. Two brothers, Teira and Meira, decide to open a confectionery business. The older brother constantly lends (kasu), while the younger brother always borrows (kariru). Because of this, the older brother earns the name “Lending Teira,” or Kasuteira (referencing the kasutera cake), and the younger brother the name “Borrowing Meira,” or Karumeira (caramel).49 Such inventions were humorous but probably not necessary by the nineteenth century. As early as 1626, kasutera and aruheit appeared on the menu of the famous banquet that Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu and his father, retired shogun Hidetada—two shoguns noted for their persecution of Christianity—hosted for Emperor Gomizuno’o in Kyoto.50 Records indicate that, nine years later, the noted Kyoto confectioner and imperial purveyor Toraya was making kasutera, karumeru (karumeira), and aruheit for its aristocratic clients in Kyoto.51 Soon southern barbarian sweets, including kasutera, bro, karumeru, and konpeit, became recognized as “local” delicacies in Nagasaki and Kyoto.52
KASUTERA, THE COOKIE FROM CASTILE
Japanese grew to love kasutera, but not until they changed the recipe and adapted new technology to the task of making it, which means that the kasutera evidenced in Edo-period cookbooks is a more advanced dish than the one in Barbarian’s Cookbook. The recipe Cookie from Castile (kasute bro) in Barbarians’ Cookbook is an early version of kasutera. It is different from the kasutera found in stores throughout Japan today, which is a rich, golden sponge cake with a browned top.53 The eggs and sugar, which are the hallmarks of this cake, make it fattening: one slice of kasutera weighing a hundred grams is 316 calories, more than twice the amount of calories in a typical slice of pork the same size.54 In that regard, the recipe for kasutera presented in Barbarians’ Cookbook is healthier, since it requires less sugar and eggs than modern versions. However, it produces something more like a pancake than a sponge cake.55
The real mystery here is how the kasutera is baked. The instructions for kasutera and cookies (bro) in Barbarians’ Cookbook call for “putting a flame above and below” (ue shita hi o oki). This refers to a primitive form of baking without an oven, a kitchen appliance not available in Japanese homes until the twentieth century.57 One of the earliest published recipes for kasutera, which appears in the culinary book Assembly of Standard Cookery Writings, adds a modification to the recipe in Barbarians’ Cookbook. It suggests lining a special confectionery pan (kashi nabe) with oiled paper (aburagami) and then pouring the mix on top of this.58 An encyclopedia published in 1712, Wakan sanzai zue, explains the process of cooking on top and bottom in more detail in its recipe for bro. It directs readers to place the bro in a pot over a fire, and to place another pot filled with coals on top, thereby sandwiching the bro between two heat sources.59 A recipe for kasutera in the first published book on Japanese confectionery, Secret Writings on Famous Japanese Confectionery New and Old (Kokon meibutsu gozen gashi hidensh; 1718), suggests using two pans, placing the container for the kasutera inside another one:
The sequel to this book, published in 1761, Schema of Famous Japanese Confectionery New and Old (Kokon meibutsu gozen gashi zushiki), provides more specific instructions for kasutera, a sweet it glosses with the Chinese characters “spring garden sweet.” In comparison to the recipe in Barbarians’ Cookbook, it uses more eggs, equal to the amount of flour, and more sugar, exceeding the amount of flour:
Though more detailed, the method of baking kasutera described here in Schema of Famous Japanese Confectionery New and Old would still produce a cake much flatter and drier than the modern version.62 It was not until the invention of a specialized apparatus for cooking kasutera that a more cakelike creation was possible. The so-called kasutera pan (kasutera nabe), which looks like a baking pan with a lid, allowed for more even distribution of heat. The first reference to the kasutera pan appears in the popular cookbook Speedy Guide to Cooking (Ryri hayashinan) by Daigo Sanjin (n.d.) published in 1822, which also included an illustration.63
Baking without an oven by placing “a heat source above and below” might have been the solution to the question of how to bake the bread in Barbarians’ Cookbook, but the recipe itself offers no confirmation of this: “Knead flour with sweet sake [amazake], and allow it to rise. Cover with a heavy blanket, and after it has risen, cook [yaku].” The recipe concludes with the notation “there are oral instructions,” which is the standard closing for all the recipes in the text.64 Since the recipe for bread in Barbarians’ Cookbook does not stipulate that it was baked in an oven, it might have been fried or grilled. The verb for cooking (yaku) used here has a broad range of meanings, including “grilling,” “roasting,” “broiling,” “baking,” “scorching,” “parching,” and even “burning.”
Secret Writings on Famous Japanese Confectionery New and Old provides a recipe for bread making that is more specific than the one in Barbarians’ Cookbook. It also describes how to build an outdoor oven that will bake the bread properly, instead of relying on a more primitive technique like cooking it “above and below.”
The necessity of such a detailed exposition on bread baking that includes building plans for an oven indicates the rarity of such technology even among professional confectioners in the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the oven demonstrates an obvious technological advance from the simple heating from “above and below” described in Barbarians’ Cookbook. The oven, like the invention of the kasutera pan, was an improvement on cooking foreign dishes that probably produced something more closely akin to the original Iberian dishes than the early adaptations found in Barbarians’ Cookbook.
The inclusion of both Iberian and Japanese sweets in Barbarians’ Cookbook has led some scholars to hypothesize that it was written by a Japanese author in the service of Jesuits living in western Kyushu in the late fifteenth century.67 While this theory has cannot be confirmed, the compiler of Barbarians’ Cookbooks clearly had intimate knowledge of Iberian confectionery, which suggests that this person or an associate had close enough contact with Spanish and Portuguese people to gain information about cooking. Since that knowledge would have to have been gathered before the departure of the Spanish and Portuguese in 1624 and 1639, respectively, this suggests a date of compilation for Barbarians’ Cookbook before the mid-seventeenth century, a cutoff point supported by the transitional nature of the recipes for Japanese sweets compared to versions in published cookbooks in the Edo period. The compilers’ knowledge of Iberian foodways is further evidenced in the second part of Barbarians’ Cookbook, which covers meat and vegetable recipes.
CHICKEN, FISH, TOFU, AND OTHER RECIPES
The second section, titled “Memos” (oboe), contains eighteen recipes, ten of which are fish, chicken, beef, and other dishes of Iberian inspiration; the remainder are of Japanese provenance. Five of the latter recipes are only notes, suggesting that their creation was already known to the compiler and reader. By including them, the compiler indicates some connection between them and the other dishes in this section.
As in the first section, the foreign recipes, except the one for preserves, are listed first. Meat Stew deserves special attention, given that beef, while favored by Iberians, was problematic for Japanese to consume. This was a result of a history of imperial edicts against beef consumption that date to the eighth century and prohibitions against beef eating reiterated by warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1587 to protect cattle for use in agriculture. Prohibitions against beef eating reappeared in the early Tokugawa period because of beef’s association with Christianity.68 Despite these prohibitions and the persisting beliefs in the spiritual and physical ill effects of meat eating, the practice of eating it continued in the Edo period, though often disguised by euphemisms and accompanied by the excuse that beef consumption was a matter of “medicinal eating” (kusuri gui).69 Reflecting the problematic place of beef consumption in this period, it is significant that this recipe for meat stew in Barbarians’ Cookbook indicates that the dish could be made with or without beef.
The Japanese recipes in this section approximate the snacks, called the after meal (godan), served to accompany a relaxed session of sake drinking after a formal honzen banquet. Ise Sadatake wrote, “The word after meal [godan] refers to the things like noodles that are served after the meal when guests are entertained.”70 The list of after-meal snacks in Tales of Cookery reveals several similarities with the list of recipes in Barbarians’ Cookbook.
Noodles and dumplings, sweetened, savory, and in a variety of sizes, are the suggested snacks for after meals, according to Tales of Cookery, and several of these dishes appear in the aforementioned section of Barbarians’ Cookbook. If these foods in Barbarians’ Cookbook were intended to be served as after-meal snacks, then they might have been meant to accompany the Southern Barbarian Fire Water that begins this section of recipes, because drinks were typically served with the snacks during an after meal. Chicken and beef stew would have been atypical dishes for a formal honzen banquet, so these too would have been better after-meal snacks. In 1711 the daimyo of Satsuma domain offered raccoon-dog (tanuki) soup for his after-meal snack.72
IBERIAN DISHES
Looking at both parts of Barbarians’ Cookbook together, at least seventeen of the forty-five recipes can be traced to Portuguese dishes, as table 3 illustrates.73 Other dishes such as the sweet chichira’ato and the terrine akamoteiri could be added to this list if their Portuguese equivalent is identified.74 In total, thirty of the forty-five recipes in Barbarians’ Cookbook reveal a degree of Portuguese influence either in their names or in their inclusion of ingredients like chicken or cooking methods like frying, which were not part of the Japanese medieval culinary repertoire expressed in culinary texts.
The predominance of recipes that are foreign in name, ingredient, and cooking technique differentiates Barbarians’ Cookbook from medieval culinary texts and from Edo-period culinary books. A few published culinary books introduced foreign foods, but only in descriptions of dining in the Chinese enclave in Nagasaki. The style of cooking these books introduce is known as “table cookery” (shippoku ryri). The term reflects the fact that diners sat at a common table rather that at individual trays as in a honzen banquet. Titles of these works include New Selection of Plans for the Tea Ceremony and Shippoku (Shinsen kaiseki shippoku shukch), published in 1771, which contains mostly Japanese recipes with illustrations of Chinese-style dining, and the 1784 publication The Shippoku Style (Shippokushiki). However, neither these works nor any other culinary book focused on Iberian recipes, making Barbarians’ Cookbook a unique source in Edo-period culinary writings.
Tempura is one recipe missing from Barbarians’ Cookbook. It is now the most famous nanban contribution to Japanese cooking and so deserves some comment. A recipe in that text for the fried chicken dish tenpurari, however, suggests a possible early prototype for tempura.
The origin and meaning of the word tempura is uncertain. It might be Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, or Dutch. One story has it that it was coined by the popular novelist Sant Kyden (1761–1816) in response to a seller of fried fish looking for a better name for his product. Kyden suggested tempura, or tenfura, which was an abbreviation for the phrase “a homeless samurai [tenjiku rnin] who suddenly appears [furari to]” and sells something. The Chinese characters Kyden chose for tempura had a double meaning: fu could signify wheat gluten, referencing the batter made from wheat flour that “coated” (ra), the fish.76 This is an interesting story, but the first reference to a dish called tempura was in 1693, well before Kyden’s birth.77 However, what this dish called tempura in 1693 actually was is uncertain.
TABLE 3 PORTUGUESE DISHES in BARBARIANS’ COOKBOOK
Japanese Dish |
Portuguese Equivalent |
Translation/Equivalent |
bro |
bolo |
cookie |
kosukuran |
coscorão |
fried dough (karinto) |
kesachiina |
queijada |
“cheese cake” |
haruteisu |
farte |
meat pie |
oiriyasu |
obréia |
bread |
kasute bro |
bolo de castella |
kasutera |
aruheit |
alfeloa |
aruheit |
karumeira |
caramelo |
caramel |
konpeit |
confeito |
konpeit |
hiryzu |
filhó |
hirsu |
tamago smen |
fios de ovos |
keiran smen |
hasuteira |
pastel |
piecrust |
pan |
pão/pan |
bread |
bisukto |
bisucouto |
biscuits |
kujiito |
cozido(?) |
stew |
nanban no hi no sake nanban no tsukemono |
|
liqueur preserves |
Throughout most of the Edo period, the word tempura referred to two different dishes. The older one of these recipes was for fish fried in oil and served in a broth; the other recipe was for the batter-fried fish-and-vegetable dish familiar as tempura today. However, the latter was not widely known as tempura until around 1750.78 One dictionary of culinary terms published in the late eighteenth century reveals this shift in the meaning of the term tempura. It defined tempura as “frying fish paste with mullet [bora] roe and serving it with stock and soy sauce [dashi shyu], green onion, and grated daikon.” However, the same text further noted: “Nowadays, any fish coated in batter, and fried in oil, and served in a hot broth is called tempura.” The coating, according to the text, was made from wheat flour.79 In other words, over time, the name tempura, which had been associated with fish fried in oil and served in broth, began to gradually reference a new dish of batter-fried fish and other foods served without a broth.
The earlier variety of tempura—fried fish in a stock—was the one associated with the death of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), founder of the Tokugawa military government and its first shogun. Ieyasu was said to have died after gorging himself on sea bream tempura—that is, sea bream cooked in oil and served in a stock with leeks. However, he actually died three months after eating this dish, so a different cause of death is certain. Culinary scholar Hirano Masa’aki identifies a similar dish from Tales of Cookery called Simmered Sea Bream Suruga Style (tai Suruga ni).80 Significantly, Suruga was the province Ieyasu lived in from 1607 until his death. The recipe from Tales of Cookery is brief but sufficient to explain how the dish is made.
A similar dish made from mullet fried in oil and served in a stock with a green onion topping is called Southern Barbarian Simmer (nanban ni) in the 1748 publication Delicacies from the Mountain and Sea (Ryri sankaiky, 1748). The recipe calls for “a striped mullet cooked whole and then fried in oil to brown; green onions are added, and it is simmered in a stock made from bonito flakes and soy sauce.”82 Besides cooking in oil, what seems to have distinguished these dishes as tempura was the fact that the fried food was served in a broth.83 Though a chicken dish, the recipe for tenpurari in Barbarians’ Cookbook was also served in a broth, and this suggests a commonality in cooking technique, if not also in name, between tenpurari and the earlier version of tempura.
The earliest recipe for the modern version of tempura is found in Threading Together the Sages of Verse (Kasen no kumi’ito), published in 1748:
Within decades this type of tempura became a popular fast food; it was sold in numerous stands (yatai) in Edo by the 1770s.85
Though there is no dish called tempura in Barbarians’ Cookbook, there is the simple recipe Fish Dish (uo no ryri), which is batter fried:
Since frying and simmering appear to be the hallmarks of tempura, this recipe appears likely to be an early version of batter-fried tempura. It is possible that, later in its history, this Fish Dish borrowed the name of a more popular recipe to make it more appealing, for the same reason that Kyden was said to have renamed a dish for the peddler.
SOUTHERN BARBARIAN CHICKEN AND OTHER “FOREIGN” DISHES
Southern barbarian is used in the title of several dishes in Barbarians’ Cookbook, and collectively they illustrate changes in thinking about the names for recipes. Medieval cookbooks list recipes by ingredient or by method of cooking, attaching fanciful names to just a handful of dishes, such as Spiny Lobster in the Shape of a Boat (ebi no funamori). In contrast, Barbarians’ Cookbook includes recipes for Southern Barbarian Dumplings (nanban mochi), a liqueur called Southern Barbarian Fire Water (nanban no hi no sake), and Preserves in the Southern Barbarian Style (nanban no tsukemono). It is difficult to see what these three dishes have in common beyond the fact that the names suggest a common point of origin or inspiration in foreign foodways. However, that can also be said of most of the dishes in the cookbook.
A fourth nanban recipe from the Barbarians’ Cookbook, simply called Southern Barbarian Dish (nanban ryri), is perhaps the most foreign to Japanese foodways, because chicken is the principle ingredient:87
Southern Barbarian Dish may be an interpretation of paella using gardenia and chicken as substitutes for saffron and seafood.89 In any case, the use of chicken is what lends the dish its novelty, because chicken, like beef, was not generally consumed in Japan until the late sixteenth century.90 The reasons for this are unclear, and as in the case of beef consumption, much of the evidence is negative—namely, the absence of chicken recipes and dishes in medieval culinary texts and menus, which represent only what the elite consumed.91 As noted earlier, culinary books by hchnin do not contain any recipes for chicken dishes, and their use of fowl in ceremonial cutting displays and in banquets is restricted to game birds. Transcript of the Knife (Hch kikigaki, c. 1540–1610), for example, identifies the three prized game birds as “crane, pheasant, and goose.”92 João Rodrigues, who lived in Japan during roughly the period in which this text was written, offered a slightly different ranking of fowl used in Japanese banquets: he ranked crane, swan, and duck as first, second, and third, respectively, calling the first two “the most highly esteemed food in Japan.” Yet he also clarified that domestically raised birds never appeared on the dining table in Japan, writing that the Japanese “eat only wild game at banquets and their ordinary meals, for they regard a householder who slaughters an animal reared in his house as cruel and unclean.” Rodrigues did take note of a change in attitude among the few Japanese merchants in contact with the Portuguese, who ate beef, pork, and chicken, but never at formal banquets.93
The foreignness of eating chicken was reiterated by the Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan, but his words also reveal a new acceptability for the bird. In a brief essay, Record of the Knife (Hch shoroku), composed in 1652, Razan lauds several dishes, like crane and carp, in lengthy anecdotes and spares a few words for chicken: “It is often recorded that in China chicken was prized. The same is true of chicken eggs.”94 For Razan at least, a Chinese precedent—not an Iberian one—provided an excuse to eat chicken despite past native preferences against it. Illness, real or feigned, provided yet another rationale for consuming chicken and other meats as a form of medicinal eating (kusuri gui). The Complete Manual of Cuisine of Our School, published in 1714, credits chicken with restorative properties for women and men:
Any initial reluctance to eating chicken seems to have disappeared by the time A Secret Box of Ten Thousand Culinary Treasures was published in the late eighteenth century, as the introduction to this text indicates:
Here, chicken is not only spotlighted but also depicted as representative of all edible fowl and presented alongside fish as a central and ancient ingredient in native foodways. The text contains twenty-nine recipes for birds, in addition to the egg recipes mentioned previously. One of these includes the recipe Chicken and Rice Dish in the Southern Barbarian Style (torimeshi nanban ryri), which is very similar to one from the Complete Manual of Cuisine of Our School examined below.97 A growing familiarity with chicken dishes, and a decline in the availability of wild game birds due to overhunting and loss of habitat, have been suggested as reasons for an upsurge in interest in chicken dishes in the late Edo.98 Since commoners were prevented by sumptuary legislation from serving wild goose, wild duck, crane, and swan at banquets, chicken would have been an alternative for them.99
Despite the gradual acceptance of eating chicken in the early modern period, the earliest published culinary books retain a medieval bias for game. In the 1643 text Tales of Cookery, chicken is the last of seventeen birds listed, and all the others are game birds. Moreover, only a few methods of preparation are listed for chicken in this text: “as a soup, simmered [iridori], sashimi, and on rice.” In contrast, there are five methods of preparing crane and ten for goose, plus “various others in addition.”100 Likewise, the Complete Manual of Cuisine of Our School, published in 1714, places chicken only after a long list of other birds that includes twenty-two varieties of duck and twenty-seven types of snipe.101
Both books contain a particular recipe for chicken called Barbarian Dish (nanban ryri), indicating that the association between Iberian foodways and chicken persisted. In the case of Tales of Cookery, the recipe for nanban ryri is for a chicken soup:
The recipe Chicken in the Southern Barbarian Style in the Complete Manual of Cuisine of Our School is for a chicken-and-rice dish. It was taken verbatim from an earlier work, the 1689 Assembly of Standard Cookery Writings (Grui nichiy ryrish):
- 1 cup of glutinous rice flour
- 1 cup of nonglutinous rice flour
- 1 cup of sake
- 1 cup of vinegar
- 1 cup of soy sauce
- 1 cup of miso
This recipe follows a different chicken-and-rice dish in the cookbook that does not call for the addition of the flavorings; consequently, it seems that, for this cookbook author at least, it was the seasonings that gave the dish its foreign flavor worthy of the name southern barbarian.
Chicken appears to have been closely associated with the southern barbarian dishes, but the fact that other dishes were called “southern barbarian” in Edo-period culinary books suggests the existence of a distinct nanban style of cooking. If a style of cooking can be extrapolated from the recipes in Barbarians’ Cookbook, it is distinguished by the use of refined sugar for the sweets and of pungent spices such as garlic and black pepper for the meat dishes. Both sweets and meat dishes utilize food colorings, including gardenia. Cinnamon and cloves are used for flavoring meats, such as in Fish Dish, which calls for powdered cloves, grated garlic, and a simmering stock. Cooking in oil seems to be a favorite technique, as in the recipe for Fried Goodie (aburamono), but other dishes are grilled, simmered, or steamed.
However, it is hard to tell why certain dishes identified as southern barbarian in Edo-period culinary books deserve that name. Some of the recipes are for fried foods. Assembly of Standard Cookery Writings contains the recipe Small Bird in the Southern Barbarian Style (kodori no nanban ryri), consisting of a small bird stuffed with fish cake, which is then fried in oil and then simmered.104 The recipe Southern Barbarian Miso (nanban miso) in Delicacies from the Mountain and Sea is for a sauce made from miso, hemp seeds, nutmeg, and Japanese pepper (sansh) fried in oil.105 However, Assembly of Standard Cookery Writings contains the recipe Octopus in a Southern Barbarian Simmer (nanban ni), which is neither fried nor flavored with exotic spices:
Simmered dishes (nimono) like this one recall the fact that the original recipe for tempura was for a simmered dish, but not all simmered dishes were nanban dishes and vice versa.107 The recipe Southern Barbarian Rice Cakes (nanban mochi) in an 1853 guide to making preserves and sweets, Three Left Secret Record (Teisa hiroku), has no relationship to the recipe in Barbarians’ Cookbook and little about it to suggest the reason for the name.108
The gap between ingredients and cooking techniques on the one hand and nomenclature on the other is even wider in the 1805 confectionery text assembled by the comic novelist Jippensha Ikku, Collection of Quick Recipes for Rice Cakes and Sweets (Mochigashi sokuseki teseish). He includes two recipes for nanban sweets. The first is Southern Barbarian Candy (nanban ame); the modern editors note it is similar to a recipe in an earlier confectionery text, but that it is not an easily identifiable sweet due to the idiosyncratic way the author miswrote the Chinese character for sugar in the recipe. The recipe that follows for a sweet called Southern Barbarian Kisen is even more problematic, since there is nothing called kisen, which literally means “tree yellow decoction.” The modern editors of the text identify it as a pun on a sweet popular in Kyoto called jisen. While the editors fault Jippensha Ikku for his sloppiness, he is clearly having fun with words, which are occupational tools for this comic novelist, rather than terms used in the confectionery trade.109 His southern barbarian sweets, like the recipes in other mid-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century culinary books, indicate that the term southern barbarian sweet had become a free-floating referent that could be used to lend any dish an exotic or comedic air.
In summary, though some of the dishes called “southern barbarian” in Barbarians’ Cookbook share a similarity in ingredients and cooking style, there is no single element that unifies these dishes and distinguishes them from the rest of the recipes in the volume. In that regard, Barbarians’ Cookbook foreshadows late-Edo-period culinary books in which southern barbarian became a free-floating term that could be applied to any dish regardless of its contents and method of cooking to give it an interesting, foreign-sounding name. What began as an effort to designate certain types of foods as somehow foreign had become part of a less precise and more playful use of language to signify old ingredients in a novel way. Part of the fun of these dishes was to try to guess why their names were used, with the author usually leaving the reason to readers to ascertain. In the case of many of these dishes, we are still guessing.
Though the exact date of Barbarians’ Cookbook is uncertain, the early prototypes of southern barbarian dishes contained in it, such as kasutera and tempura, suggest that the work was composed by the early decades of the seventeenth century. It covers ingredients and cooking techniques not found in late medieval culinary texts by hchnin, and it prefigures recipes for sweets and other dishes further developed in Edo-period culinary books. Though the original text lacks a title, the names for the recipes are given, and this too became a trend in Edo-period culinary texts, to the point that authors like Jippensha Ikku might simply concoct the names of dishes first and then cut the recipes out of whole cloth to make their cookbook collections more entertaining to readers.