ryri ky’sho (Text for Banquets, the Cooking of Fish and Fowl, late eighteenth century)Cuisine is like a performance of Noh by the four troupes.
The menu is the program for the performance. The fish, fowl, vegetables, and gourds are the actors.
—Gyoch ryri ky’sho (Text for Banquets, the Cooking of Fish and Fowl, late eighteenth century)
The previous chapter introduced the ironic fact that menu collections (kondatesh
), one of the major categories of published culinary books (ryribon) in the Edo period, included complex meals that most of their readers could not create because of the menus’ expense and complexity and the existence of sumptuary laws that prohibited the use of key ingredients and elaborate methods of serving. Published menus might be thought of as poor substitutes for actual meals, like scripts to plays without actors to perform them, to borrow the metaphor from Text for Banquets cited in the chapter epigraph. But just as a play can be read as literature and enjoyed without being staged, so can a menu. Published menu collections are comparable to the printed books of plays (utaibon) for the masked Noh theater, which provided multiple ways to enjoy Noh beyond acting in a performance. Utaibon, printed in the thousands in the Edo period, were brought by audiences so that they could follow the dialogue at performances and catch all the literary allusions. Amateurs used utaibon as musical scores to study Noh chanting and selections of dances; only professionals could take the stage in full performances. Consequently, many of the thousands of different Noh plays written in the Edo period appear to have been created solely for reading or singing, not for staging as plays.
Just as printed non libretti allowed new forms of performance and appreciation, printed menu books represent a popularization and transformation of previous culinary discourse, which had conferred special meanings on inedible dishes. Books of menus disseminated information about how hch
nin, the chefs to the samurai and aristocratic elite, utilized inedible dishes like the snacks for the shikisankon and like spiny lobster in the shape of a boat (Ise ebi no funamori) to evoke symbolic meanings and create artistic displays at elite banquets. However, because nearly all the readership of these books could not create these dishes and the elaborate banquets that featured them, printed collections of menus called kondatesh became a way to appreciate elegant meals without creating or eating them. Medieval rules for cooking and dining became the guidelines for a literary genre in the Edo period, allowing readers to view not just a few dishes as special, as at an actual banquet, but to conceive of entire banquets as abstract meditations on food. Early menu collections such as Collection of Cooking Menus (Ryri kondatesh, 1671) and Guide to Meals for the Tea Ceremony (Cha no yu kondate shinan, 1696) provided readers with the vicarious pleasure of learning about the dining habits of the elite. However, later menu collections, such as Fish Trap of Recipes (Kondatesen, 1760), explored thematic menus with ideas borrowed from the theater and popular culture. All these menu collections included some information about cooking and serving food, but their main contribution to the development of cuisine was their dissemination of ways to fantasize about food in its absence.
FIGURE 7. Noh actors crowned with food headdresses, from Text for Banquets: The Cooking of Fish and Fowl (Gych ryri ky’sho). Courtesy of Kaga Bunko, Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library.
The first of these published collections, printed in 1671, had the redundant name Collection of Cooking Menus. It was similar to the first published cookbook, Tales of Cookery (Ryri monogatari), which appeared twenty-eight years earlier. Both of these anonymous books begin with a table of contents, reaffirming the break from the manuscript tradition of hchnin, who eschewed these. The wording of the table of contents for Collection of Cooking Menus, though not as clear as the one for Tales of Cookery, followed a roughly similar format of different types of food preparation.
Cooking Menus for Twelve Months
Plan for Various “Rural Soups”
Plan for Arranging Soups for Snacks [atsumono]
Fish, Fowl, and Vegetable Snacks
The Format for Trays for Weddings
Cooking Menus for Fish, Fowl, and Vegetables
Cooked Salads [aemaze] with Fish, Fowl and Vegetables
Simmered Dishes from Fish, Fowl, and Vegetables
Sashimi from Fish, Fowl, and Vegetables
Blended Dishes from Fish, Fowl, and Vegetables
Plan for Side Dishes Served on Trays [mukzuke]
Grilled Things as Snacks
Pairings for Simmered Fowl
Fish for Making Fish Cake1
Despite the title of the book and the wording of some of the headings, only one section contains menus, the one titled “The Format for Trays for Weddings.” The first and sixth sections, titled “Cooking Menus,” focus instead on soups (shiru) and fish and vegetable salads (namasu), the focal dishes on the main tray at a honzen banquet.2
Thus, rather than an actual “collection of menus,” Collection of Cooking Menus is a description of the components for menus in the form of recipes for various dishes found in honzen banquets. The colophon to the manuscript explains the rationale for this:
There are many culinary writings, but this book records culinary pairings on a monthly basis from the first month to the twelfth month [useful] to assemble the parts of a menu and the composition of the dishes in it. There are many varieties of side dishes, grilled dishes, and fish cakes, and this work uses time-honored methods of preparation for these. Since it is a work for publication, it omits serving suggestions for delicacies that are best recommended to people of high station.3
Collection of Cooking Menus provides recipes month by month that can be selected to fit into a menu of one’s own choosing that would be seasonally appropriate and suitable for the status of commoners. The work begins with soups (shiru), whose number would correspond to the size of a menu planned, since each tray for a honzen meal needed one soup. After selecting the soups, readers could choose a number of side dishes, depending on the number they had in mind for each tray. The recipes themselves are simple to the point that it would be better to consider them as serving suggestions, because they offer no advice about methods of preparation. They instead catalogue ingredients that might be served together. For instance, here are the first three soups (shiru) for the second month:
Soup—young sweetfish [koayu], taro buds
Soup—crane, leeks
Soup—crane, mushrooms, raw wasabi, sugina shoots [tsukushi]4
Despite the claims that the book omitted foods for people of high status, crane soup was a high-status dish, one served to daimyo not commoners, who were prohibited by sumptuary rules from eating game fowl at banquets.
The two menus for weddings also betray a bias toward elite manners of serving that were inappropriate to commoners. One wedding banquet begins with the three ceremonial rounds of drinks (shikisankon) featuring the most formal types of foods, including dried chestnuts, abalone, konbu seaweed, dried anchovies (gomame), pickled apricots, green onions, and a simmer (zni) made from rice cake, dried intestines of sea cucumber (iriko), konbu tied in knots, potato, bonito flakes, and skewered abalone. This version of zni included two skewered dishes, indicating that it was prepared in a style favored by elite warriors and aristocrats.5 Following the shikisankon, there were several snacks listed: herring roe, rolled squid, dried mullet roe (karasumi), a soup (atsumono) prominently featuring a fish fin in the style of ceremonial cuisine (shikish ryri), and two types of sake: sweet (nurizake) and heated.
The wedding banquet menus also call for more than two trays of food, a style of service denied commoners according to a bakufu edict issued three years before the publication of Collection of Cooking Menus. The first menu consists of three trays, with a soup on each and five, three, and three side dishes, respectively (i.e., a 5–3-3 format). Additional trays of snacks followed. The other menu is for five trays—a style of dining that even daimyo could not utilize—in a format of 4–5-2–3-2. Both of these menus show a profound influence of ceremonial cuisine, the trademark of hchnin, as the first menu, consisting of three trays of food, reveals:
Main Tray
Fish salad (namasu) of ginger, fish, daikon, chestnut, and citron
Soup of skewered fish, skewered abalone, burdock, daikon, and shiitake
Grilled dish, sliced
Simmered dish
Pickles
Cooked salad (aemono)
Here only the soup and salad are described, and the type of fish in the namasu is omitted, but the presence of both a namasu and an aemono, which were similar dishes, speaks to the luxury of the meal. The soup also makes use of skewered foods, which indicate high status, as noted earlier. The author likewise specifies only the ingredients of some of the dishes on the second and third trays.
Second Tray
Shell grill (kaiyaki)6
Soup: miso soup with fowl, mushrooms, and wheat gluten
Octopus
Dried squid
Fish cake
Sushi
Third Tray
Snipe wing serving (hamori)
Soup (“anything appropriate and seasonal”)
Spiral shellfish
Spiny lobster served in the shape of a boat (ebi no funamori)
FIGURE 8. Chefs preparing a meal, from Collection of Cooking Menus (Ryri kondatesh). Courtesy of Iwase Bunko.
The second and third trays of this menu show the influence of ceremonial cuisine in the decorative “servings” (mori) of lobster and the snipe prepared with its feathered wings reattached (hamori), two trademark pieces of professional hchnin (see plate 4). This text does not include directions for the hamori and spiny lobster. Therefore, in order to have them at a banquet, a reader would have to employ a hchnin, something above the status of the readers addressed in the colophon of this work.
That cooking is something for occupational specialists and not for amateur readers is confirmed by the illustrations to Collection of Cooking Menus. The text contains several illustrations of chefs at work and lists their names and duties. The first (figure 8) depicts two chefs wearing formal kimono and trousers with swords tucked in their belts, working at cutting boards. One slices a sea bream and the other a game bird, probably a goose. A third chef, dressed more casually, with his sleeves rolled up, cuts a monstrous catfish hanging from a rope.
Another image (figure 9) shows six more individuals at work: on the top right side, a master of the menu (kondateshi) points to a menu affixed to the wall. Next to him is the master of simmered dishes (nikata no mono). Two pages (kosh) who carry trays head off to the left while a master of the room (ita no ma no mono) puts the final touches on some additional dishes for the pages to carry. The figure in the bottom right corner is difficult to identify, since the text is obscured, but he is probably the kitchen overseer (daidokoro bugy). All these workers appear to be lower-level samurai, employed presumably by a more powerful upper-level samurai, such as a daimyo, who could afford an extensive cooking staff.
FIGURE 9. Kitchen staff, from Collection of Cooking Menus. Courtesy of Iwase Bunko.
Both the wedding menus and the portraits of chefs suggest a realm of cuisine beyond the capacity of nearly all the readers of Collection of Cooking Menus to emulate except in the most basic ways. Readers might create a recipe for a “rural soup” from one of the book’s recipes, but the most elaborate dishes, such as the spiny lobster in the shape of a boat, are not even described in full. Nevertheless, by including these dishes and descriptions of elaborate banquets, the book offers the possibility that food exists in a system of culinary meaning beyond the level of the rural soup. In the absence of the ability to create and eat these dishes in reality, readers could still imagine such banquets and the employment of the people who could prepare them. Collection of Cooking Menus is sketchy on the details of such dreams, but the next text we will consider offers a complete vision of what such a fantasy banquet would look like if one could invite the shogun to dinner.
Published twenty-eight years after Collection of Cooking Menus, the 1696 book Guide to Meals for the Tea Ceremony continued the trend in presenting elite menus for a wider audience. Despite the title, only the last three volumes in this eight-volume work cover menus for the tea ceremony. The first three feature the most formal cuisine appropriate to a visitation (onari) by a shogun or daimyo to the mansion of another high-ranking warrior or a temple. The type of food served on this occasion falls in the realm of ceremonial cuisine prepared by hchnin. However, this text is not directed to an audience of “men of the carving knife” like the culinary texts written by hchnin. Instead, it marks a new way of understanding food preparation and service: as one best realized as a mental activity rather than an actual one. It becomes clear after dipping into the text that the banquet described would have been beyond the financial capabilities of all but the most wealthy and powerful, who would number a few of the richest daimyo.
The author of Guide to Meals for the Tea Ceremony, End Genkan (d. c. 1700), was the most prolific writer about the tea ceremony in the Genroku period (1688–1704). He wrote thirteen of the twenty-five books on tea ceremony published in that period, introducing many topics to readers for the first time.7 His Guide to Meals for the Tea Ceremony is the first published work on the topic of meals for tea ceremonies, while his Three Teachings about the Tea Ceremony (Cha no yu sendensh), published in 1691, was the first work on flower arrangement for tea.8 Despite his achievements, we know little about him, and only a few of his texts are available in modern editions.9 What we do know about End comes from what can be gleaned from this writings.
End Genkan was a practitioner of the Ensh
school of tea, which traced its heritage back to Kobori Ensh (1579–1649), not Sen no Riky, the founder of the Omotesenke, Urasenke, and Mushanokji Senke lineages that dominate tea practice, research, and appreciation today. Accordingly, End Genkan’s name and contributions are omitted from the so-called bible of the Japanese tea practitioner Sasaki Sanmi, the classic Chado, the Way of Tea: A Japanese Tea Master’s Almanac (Sad saijiki), which details the lore of the Urasenke tradition. There has been only one short chapter on his published works, leaving his unpublished writings on tea and his works on other topics yet to be catalogued and studied by modern scholars.10
Based on what can be learned from his writings, End Genkan was a pediatrician who, in 1656, became a student of tea master Okabe Dka (1591–1684) in Edo, studying with him for nearly three decades. Okabe was a samurai in the employ of the Maeda daimyo house of Kaga domain (modern Ishikawa prefecture) as an instructor of the gaudy Ensh way of tea, which featured a more flamboyant “daimyo style” over the rustic style (wabicha) expounded by Riky’s successors. Okabe, who studied directly with Kobori Ensh, was an extremely long-lived and renowned teacher said to have had more than a thousand students by the time he died, at age ninety-seven.11 After his teacher’s death, End moved to Kyoto, where he continued his medical practice, taught the tea ceremony, and wrote about it.12 In the introduction to Guide to Meals for the Tea Ceremony, he describes himself as “having a body that is old and wasting” and identifies his occupation as “retired” (inshi). Yet Genkan was able to publish several more books on the tea ceremony in the late 1690s. His publications ceased in the first decade of the eighteenth century. Formal Service for the Tea Ceremony (Cha no shin daisu, 1705), is probably the last work printed in his lifetime, according to Yokota Yaemi, who has surveyed all of End’s published writings on tea.13
End Genkan’s tea writings are distinguished by their detailed attention to all aspects of the tea ceremony. His first published work, Three Teachings about the Tea Ceremony, presents the instructions of Sen no Riky, Furuta Oribe (1543–1615), and Kobori Ensh on topics such as flower arrangements for tea, the arrangement of charcoal for the brazier, interior design, and the instructions for hosting a tea ceremony, including the preparations. The three masters represent the lineage of End’s way of tea, called the Ensh school, and the text is an homage to End’s teacher, Okabe Dka, whose instructions supplied most of the information in three volumes of the work, according to End, who also added a fourth volume of additional teachings. End revised the text in 1695, as Illustrations of the Secrets of the Tea Ceremony (Cha no yu hiden zushiki), and the book was published again in 1824, a century after End’s death.
End provides a précis to his early tea writings in the introduction to Guide to Meals for the Tea Ceremony. After humbly describing his Three Teachings about the Tea Ceremony as a “source for jokes,” and saying that “he hoped it would be some help to people,” he explains that he edited Hoarfrost Moon Collection (Shimotsukish), published in 1692, “to inform people about how to decorate a drawing room [shoin] for a tea ceremony.” He continues: “Since Three Teachings about the Tea Ceremony did not record all the intricacies of the prescribed actions between the host and the guest, I created Transmission on the Style of Tea Ceremony [Cha no yu ry densho], in which these matters are set down in detail.”14 This six-chapter work published in six volumes in 1694, also known as Transmissions for Our School’s Way of Tea Ceremony (Try cha no yu ry densho), is a veritable encyclopedia of the Ensh style of tea.
In addition to his thirteen volumes of published tea writings, End published two texts on warrior etiquette and customs: Review of Warriors in Our Land (Honch buke hyrin) and Grand Genealogy of a Review of Warriors in Our Land (Honch buke hyrin kezu). Both appeared in print in 1699. Additionally, he wrote a treatise on marriage, Recorded Treasury on Taking a Bride (Yometori chhki), published in 1697. These writings demonstrate a concern for formality and procedure. Guide to Meals for the Tea Ceremony confirms that the author took great interest in every aspect of ceremonial matters, and that he was eager to convey these minutiae to readers.
Yokota Yaemi, the scholar who undertook the first survey of End Genkan’s published writings, has praised him for omitting anecdotal information and discussing only factual matters of the tea ceremony.15 Yet there is also a degree of unreality in End’s writings. Though participant in a revival of tea traditions that included not only Riky but also the other founders of his Ensh lineage, End also lived at a time when novelist Ihara Saikaku (1642–93) and playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724) were making their livings by offering dramatizations of daily life for a popular audience, and there are similarities between End’s writings and those of these other authors.16 Like Chikamatsu and Saikaku, End sustained his art through the support of commoners—his tea students and the audience for his published writings.17 Chikamatsu and Saikaku used fiction to dramatize possible outcomes to mundane situations, while End provided a view of elite warrior life so rich in detail that it seemed real, but at the same time, one so elevated that it too was a departure from the mundane life of his audience of affluent townspeople and lower-level samurai. End enumerated the customs of the military elite, and, like playwrights and novelists of the time, he observed the government prohibition against including the actual names of contemporary daimyo and shoguns in his book. Finally, in the same way that Saikaku and Chikamatsu wrote about notorious love affairs or lovers’ suicides secondhand, End was not a direct participant in the scenes he described. He explained that he had to rely on informants for all his knowledge about hosting visitations by elite warriors. Taking their various accounts and weaving them seamlessly together, End presented his imagined version of events for his readers’ pleasure.
In the introduction, End lists his reasons for writing Guide to Meals for the Tea Ceremony, and he intimates how he obtained his information.
There are many customary instructions in the way of tea, and as for the finer points from long ago, these too are diverse. That being said, there are no writings about the kaiseki meals for the tea ceremony. Consequently, I assembled this text, Guide to Meals for the Tea Ceremony.
A long time ago there was a text called Riky’s Hundred [Tea] Ceremonies that was something worldly people carried in their pockets, but this has old practices not suitable for tea meals today. I do not know much about cuisine [ryri]. However, following my deceased father’s direction, I saw and heard about the tea ceremony from childhood; and each year, thanks to my teacher, I learned anew the cuisine for the ceremony of the opening of the tea jar [kuchi kiri], so that if I were to recall two or three of these [meals] and record them, eventually it would add up to one hundred.18 If [most] people try their hand at these, there would probably be something out of season; and even if they had fish or fowl, the pairing would not be good. They may not notice this because of their ignorance.
Despite his humble protests that he did not know much about cuisine, End Genkan claimed that he knew more than most people because of his special experiences, such as attending more than a hundred celebrations of the “opening of the tea jar” (kuchi kiri), one of the most important events in the tea ceremony calendar. Called the “New Year for tea practitioners,” the “opening of the tea jar” in the tenth month of the year, when it was celebrated in the Edo period, marked the first serving of the year’s harvested thick tea and the transition to a winter mode of tea service using a sunken hearth (ro). The fact that End Genkan claims to have attended one hundred such ceremonies, despite the fact that these events occurred only once a year, speaks to his claims to expertise in the formalities of the way of tea. End casts himself as a narrator who promises to guide readers through the world of tea cuisine, the closed preserve of specialists and the elite, and one fraught with pitfalls even for those who could afford to serve fish and fowl but were ignorant of the proper way to do so.
End’s personal recollections of New Year’s tea ceremonies contrast his presentation of himself in the remainder of the introduction as an outsider to meals served during formal visitations by a shogun or daimyo. Since only the shogun or daimyo made such visitations, either one is the possible intended guest in End’s description, and he left that person’s identify for readers to decide. This lack of specificity may also reflect a deficit of knowledge. End explains that he had to learn about visitations from others since his own rank prohibited him from witnessing them firsthand.
When it comes to the matter of a lord’s visit to a grand room [daishoin], which is the formal reception room decorated in the shoin style, I myself have always been a person of low status, therefore I do not know much about matters pertaining to people of high rank. I listened to what my teacher said, and visited people who were accomplished in our school, and although my understanding about this is insufficient, I relied on my brush to record it all, completely, in every detail, so that it might take us all one step forward [in our art].19
Constructing a narrative pieced together from the words of his teacher and other informants, End is necessarily presenting an idealized version of events based on other people’s accounts. Inviting his readers to join him in this meditation, he allows them the opportunity to observe something they ordinarily could not see and, perhaps, to go so far as to envision themselves in the role of a powerful and wealthy lord who would play host to another one.
End’s text promises in eight volumes something special, not simply menus for the tea ceremony but also a description, based on secondhand knowledge, of how to serve a meal to a shogun or a daimyo paying a formal visit to another person of high rank. This he provides in exhausting detail in the first three volumes of his book. Volumes 4 through 6 present more conventional but still glamorous menus for the tea ceremony arranged month by month, with some notations about food preparation. Volume 7 offers vegetarian (shjin) tea menus, including a vegetarian version of the meal for the lord’s visitation. The eighth volume covers other matters of formal banqueting, including the three ceremonial rounds of drinking (shikisankon) and more general pronouncements about tea cuisine, such as proper dining behavior at tea meals, further recipes, and tea and dining utensils.
Before I examine End Genkan’s description of hosting a visitation (onari), some background information about these formal visits by shogun and daimyo is warranted. The custom of visitations began in the Muromachi period as an annual or irregular visit by a shogun to one of his chief retainers or by one powerful warlord to another.20 The shogun’s visitations began in the early afternoon around 2:30 and ended in midmorning the next day around 10:00.21 The host greeted his guest in a private room, where the three ceremonial rounds of drinking (shikisankon) occurred. Then the host and the shogun exchanged gifts, such as swords and saddles.22 Afterward, the group retired to a larger “public” room (kaisho) for a banquet in the honzen style. On these occasions the most formal types of ceremonial cuisine (shikish ryri) was served to the main guest, with other warriors in attendance receiving less lavish servings according to their rank. Further rounds of drinking followed the meal, and more presents were exchanged, such as swords, Chinese paintings, horses, imported artifacts, and robes. After more drinking, the shogun retired to a separate room for a rest and perhaps a bowl of tea. Later in the evening, he returned to the main room to enjoy Noh theater and other entertainments, accompanied by even more drinking and refreshments.23
Onari were expressions of shogunal authority and power, as well as occasions for the shogun to reaffirm his personal relationship with key vassals. Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimochi (1386–1428) conducted an average of sixty such visits yearly to the homes of retainers and to prominent temples. In the year 1440 alone, the sixth shogun, Ashikaga Yoshinori (1394–1441), made 130 onari. Some onari occurred annually, others were by invitation. By custom, the Ashikaga shogun visited the home of the deputy shogun (kanrei) on the second day of the New Year.24
The practice of shogunal visits continued in the Edo period. The second and third shoguns, Tokugawa Hidetada and Tokugawa Iemitsu, averaged four visitations a year to powerful daimyo. Edo-period visitations were simplified compared to their Muromachi forerunners. The opening events began in the early morning around 6:00 and usually took place in tea-ceremony rooms (sukiya) with a tea ceremony and simplified meal. Following that, a shikisankon was performed in a larger room, in the Muromachi-period custom.25
Visitations allowed the shogun and daimyo with sufficient status and wealth to demonstrate authority and confirm hierarchical relationships through ritual. Sumptuary legislation and cost prevented anyone else from even attempting such political exercises. For example, End Genkan’s description of a meal for a lord’s visitation, analyzed in detail below, included three trays with a soup each and nine side dishes in the 3-2-4 format.26 Even if a commoner could manage to put together the components for the extensive meal and consume it in secret, staging a visitation required an appropriate architectural setting, as End indicated, which would have been much more expensive and impossible to conceal from the authorities. For a visit by Shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (1646–1709) in 1698, the daimyo of Owari domain rebuilt his mansion in Edo at the cost of two hundred thousand ry, an amount more than the domain’s total annual expenditures for a typical year.27
Since a formal visitation might necessitate constructing new buildings in preparation, Guide to Meals for the Tea Ceremony begins its descriptions of visitations by providing directions for creating the appropriate building, called a grand study (daishoin), where the initial proceedings for the visitation would take place.28 Construction of such a room and the building to house it would have to begin “two to three years before hosting a visitation by a lord” in order to be completed in time, according to End Genkan.29 He admitted that the size of such a room would depend on the wealth and status of its owner, and that carpenters would know the particulars of its construction.
After sketching out the architectural details, End described the appropriate decorations for the grand study, which featured a series of alcoves, each requiring different displays. One alcove pictured in his illustrations shows a hanging scroll with a painting of a large bird in the background; an incense burner in the shape of a deer sits on a small table in the foreground. In another alcove a box for writing papers, a large container for a seal, and a mouth organ (sh) rest on a row of high shelves; a small statue of what appears to be an Iberian merchant sits on a lower shelf or the floor in front. Other illustrations show the appropriate flower arrangements, either standing alone or complementing small paintings, for these alcoves. In one of these a large basket of wisteria hangs suspended above a miniature garden of stones on a platter.
End clarifies the types of flower arrangements for these occasions.
The previous illustrations of large floral settings are quite different from the ones typical of formal flower arrangements [rikka]. The form here is for tea flowers [chabana], so that is the method I am conveying here, not the one for formal flower arrangements. The public might think that it has to be formal flower arrangements for occasions like a lord’s visit, but employing arrangements such as these is formal enough. Consequently, I have presented in illustrations large floral settings of various types for the edification of ordinary folk.30
End’s comments regarding the history of flower arrangement reveal a transition away from the stiff rikka style favored in the medieval period to the more whimsical and simple style of tea flowers, but his rhetoric also deserves close attention. He writes as if members of the public (sejin) could actually build such a grand study and fill it with flowers and other delicate furnishings. He allows “ordinary folk” this fantasy while at the same time confirming his role as authority in these matters. Readers might go so far as to reproduce one of End’s suggested flower arrangements as a memento of a world otherwise forbidden to them, but that would be only a fraction of the setting required. End’s illustrations complete the fantastic scene by including illustrations of the formal doorway for a closet in the room and illustrations showing how decorations for the tea implements should be arranged.
After setting the stage and putting the props in place, End proceeds to arrange for the lord’s visit.
After a grand study has been constructed, the host who desires a lord to visit will, two or three months or even half a year in advance, pay a visit to the lord’s subordinates and request the honor of the lord’s presence on such and such a date. The subordinates present this request to the lord. Following that, the host is summoned to the lord’s presence and the date of the visit is proclaimed, as well as a command that the preparations for the visit be as simple as possible. The host thanks the lord graciously, saying, “I could not ask for anything better,” and then he departs. Then the host ought to pay a visit to the lord’s subordinates and senior retainers in order to express his thanks.31
Like a playwright, here and in other places, End provides snippets of dialogue for his scenes, all the better for his readers to imagine them occurring. He allows the lord to adopt a moralistic tone by requesting his future host to exercise some frugality in making his plans. The host eagerly accepts both the moral and the financial responsibility for the enormous expense related to the event.
Next End advises readers on the steps needed to prepare for the visitation. These would begin with finalizing the decorations in the grand study according to his previous directions, then determining the menu and the events that would proceed and follow the meal. He instructs readers to create a to-do list and copy it out two or three times before assigning servants to the appropriate tasks and drilling them until they become accustomed to accomplishing them well.32
Of all the preparations, deciding on the menu appears to have been the most complicated and serious one, even though it was only a meal for one. End does not discuss what anyone else present at the visitation should eat. Others, such as the host and the lord’s retainers, might consume something, but like the readers, they were to be spectators of the lord’s gastronomic pleasures, and their likes and dislikes and menu did not merit much attention. The process of creating the menu for the lordly guest proceeds through several steps and involves a range of people from the host’s and lord’s staffs. Initially, “the menu should be decided by politely discussing the foods with the masters of the lord’s chambers [niwaban], his inspectors, and by summoning chefs [ryrinin].” Then, End indicates, one should
call the masters of affairs [detban] from the castle and show them the menu that was decided. Ask about the lord’s likes and dislikes and revise the menu accordingly. Since using even a little of something that the lord dislikes might make him ill, it is best to make careful inquiries well in advance. Moreover, asking the masters of affairs about the menu will mean that the topic will come up in the lord’s presence. One will learn the lord’s preferences that way. Accordingly, if one inquires well in advance, one will be able to conform to the lord’s tastes and will avoid any illness caused by the foods.33
However, in a manner this serious, outside experts must be consulted.
From the time the menu is determined, one should summon one or two medical doctors associated with the lord and consult with them about the menu. Carefully examine the good and bad points of the food combinations. Also, let those affiliated with the lord know about the menu, and ask them to carefully investigate these matters for some time. This way, doctors will also take great care in the matter, and the menu will be something that is well conceived.34
End was himself a doctor, and in volume 8 of the same book he provides a list of foods that should not be eaten together. He observes that eating ripe persimmon after consuming crab frequently causes food poisoning, and that devil’s tongue (kon’yaku) should not be served with spiral shellfish.35 Since any meal for a daimyo or shogun would contain a multitude of dishes, his listings of problematic food combinations was no substitute for the advice of specialists needed to detect potential problems with a menu. End’s caution reveals the anxiety inherent in preparing a meal for a daimyo or shogun. He omits mention of the possible punishments awaiting someone who might even accidentally sicken a daimyo or shogun, but his worries about food poisoning and unhealthy food combinations add a dose of realism and a touch of dramatic tension to End’s account.
Not sparing any expense, End stipulates that all the trays for serving the lord his food will have to be newly lacquered. New rice bowls must be ordered for the lord’s use. The lacquer bowls should bear the lord’s crest. For readers curious about the exact dimensions and designs of these, End provides his characteristically exacting descriptions.
Having discussed all the preparations that would go into the menu, the expert advice to be sought, the arrangements to be made with samurai officials, the orders to be placed with craftsmen, and the food combinations to be medically analyzed, End finally presents his “formal menu for the visit by a lord” (onari no seishiki kondate), which would take place on the twenty-sixth day of the eighth month. Though End provided some notations about serving vessels, he was not consistent in doing so; and the following description omits these and focuses on the foods alone.36
Main Tray
Fish salad (namasu)
sea bream, whiting, turbot, chestnuts, ginger, kumquat, udo shoots, peeled tangerine37
Soup—a stew using dark miso
daikon, taro, dried sea cucumber on a skewer, pressed cut meat of fish or fowl, small shiitake mushrooms
Pickles38
pickled Moriguchi daikon
pickles in the Nara style
tiny eggplants
Salad (aemono) of seafood and vegetables:
finely cut abalone on a stick, dried gourd, hulled chestnuts, miso with sesame and black pepper
Rice
The fish salad (namasu) exemplifies the luxury of the foods served in this menu. It is a lavish version of dish typically found on the first tray of a honzen meal. Here it contains three varieties of seafood accented with ginger, tangerine peels, and other ingredients.
Typical recipes for namasu such as those found in Assembly of Standard Cookery Writings (Grui nichiy ryrish), published six years before End’s text, call for only one fish and use only lower-quality fish such as carp, sardines, and crucian carp.39 The salad (aemono) is similar to the namasu, and the presence of both dishes on a single tray indicates luxury. Similarly, End’s soup contains dried sea cucumber on a skewer, a dish restricted by sumptuary legislation to high-ranking samurai such as daimyo.40 Though the Nara-style pickles and the Moriguchi daikon might be produced locally, creating the other dishes in Kyoto, where End Genkan lived, would require that the seafood be transported over a considerable distance. Consequently, even assembling the ingredients for the first tray would have been a considerable undertaking in End’s time, but the banquet to be set before the lord was even more complex since it included two more trays.
Second Tray
Simmered dish
whitebait mixed with scrambled egg and citron
Soup—crane in a light miso broth:
sinews from a crane’s leg, burdock, salted matsutake mushrooms, eggplant, shimeji mushrooms, leafy green vegetables (kona)
Grilled dish—salmon with wasabi and sauce
Small dishes of parched salt and cracked Japanese pepper (sansh)
Third Tray41
Sashimi—carp with roe, shredded and also cut into flat sections
Soup—grated yam with boiled sea cucumber marinated in sake with green nori
A large carp, broiled without seasoning, served with a sauce
Broiled game bird—duck on round slices of tangerine with water dropwart (seri)
Crane, served in a soup on the second tray, was a focal point in elite warrior banquets. It is of course no longer served in Japan, but matsutake mushrooms remain an expensive autumn delicacy. One modern commentator called eating them “one of the great experiences of life.”42 Matsutake are a delicacy because they cannot be cultivated and have to be gathered in the wild. Here, these foods compete with other dishes for the diner’s attention. Grilled salmon, broiled duck, simmered whitebait, and sea cucumber soup all provide delectable distractions.
End gives directions in volume 3 for serving the meal to the lord. He indicates that the lord will take the precaution of bringing his own food tasters to sample the dishes before he eats, but that it will be the personal honor of the host to serve the lord. In this procedure, the host first inquires of the lord’s men if the lord would like to eat, saying, “If it is convenient for you, I would like to present the banquet trays.” The vassals convey this message to the lord, who responds, “That would be fine if it is convenient for you,” at which point the host appears before the lord.
The host serves the main tray to the lord, placing it in front of him, and then stands and retreats.
The host’s oldest son brings out the second tray and places it on the side of the main tray with the soup on it.
The second son brings out the third tray and places it on the side of the main tray with the rice on it.
Servants bring out the trays for the lord’s followers.
Servants bring out the grilled and simmered dishes. Generally once the trays are served, the host and his sons do not appear needlessly in front of the lord.43
End goes into great detail about how the trays should be carried, where they are to be placed, and what to do if the lord kindly offers something tasty from his own plate to the host. According to the above description and custom, the second tray goes on the right side of the main tray, and the third tray on the left, from the perspective of the guest.
End advises readers on the polite way to behave in front of a lord. “It is rude to talk while eating something or to burst out in a loud voice. Of course, when eating a large amount [of food], no one can say anything.” Presumably it was a bad idea to eat a large amount of food in the first place. However, there were far worse things to avoid: “Using a chopstick as a toothbrush is completely out of bounds.” And “making loud munching sounds when chewing on a bone from a grilled dish or something else is atrocious.”44
End’s banquet hardly ends with three trays of food. Following the custom of honzen meals, no sake would be served until the foods on the trays had been eaten or at least been given some of the guest’s attention. The guest might also want to save some room for the delicacies in the form of snacks (sakana) and snack soups (atsumono) that accompanied the “interval sake” that followed the honzen banquet. These additional soups and snacks were served on individual small trays (oshiki). The snacks End planned to serve with sake for the lord’s visit were quite elaborate.
Soup—oysters, finely ground pepper
Side dishes (sakana)
Shelled crab with tofu lees
Abalone covered with Japanese pepper-miso sauce
Soup of dark miso with small grilled crucian carp
Dried mullet roe
Grilled pheasant with salt and Japanese pepper
Soup of water snail (tanishi), mioga buds, light soy sauce45
Fish cake
Fish salad of clam with Japanese mustard (karashi)
Soup of dried sardines and freshwater suizenji nori in light soy sauce46
Dried squid tied together and artfully cut (makizurume)
This was quite an assortment of snacks, but the menu contained yet another stage of eating, namely, sweets to accompany thick tea.
Tea Sweets
Quail rice cakes (uzura mochi)
Gingko nuts cured in spices (nishime)
Peeled chestnuts (mizuguri)
Tea—“recent past” (hatsu mukashi) variety [served in a] tenmoku bowl with a stand
Accompanying Sweets
Persimmons from Yamato province
Large pears
The tea sweets continue the overall message of opulence of the banquet. The “recent past” variety of powdered tea named here was produced in Uji, south of Kyoto, and it was preferred by the Tokugawa shoguns who gave it that poetic name (mei).47 The use of a Chinese-style (tenmoku) tea bowl with a stand indicates a high level of formality appropriate to the exalted rank of the guest. The quail rice cakes were made from glutinous rice mixed with water that was first steamed, then pounded in a mortar, and then formed around a filling of adzuki bean paste; the shape of the rice cake suggested the appearance of a quail.48 The peeled chestnuts soaked in salt water called mizuguri were restricted to high-ranking samurai such as daimyo.49 Though the pears were just coming into season, the Yamato persimmons, also called “imperial palace persimmons,” would have been early for the twenty-sixth day of the eighth month, when End set his menu. Moreover, eating these at that time would have been illegal for commoners, following bakufu sumptuary legislation promulgated in 1686 (a decade before End published his book) and stipulating that these persimmons could be purchased only after the ninth month.50 (Of course, such restrictions did not apply to elite samurai or to the imaginary world of culinary books.) Despite their rarity, the tea sweets were more savory than sweet and would probably disappoint modern readers craving a rich dessert. Nevertheless, by late-seventeenth-century standards these were ostentatious.
Even though End Genkan warned his readers in his introduction to avoid foods that were out of season, his menu demonstrates a creative use of seasonality in several places, meaning that he chose foods without regard to whether they were available or at their supposed peak in flavor. Today, Japanese chefs and tea masters pride themselves on expressing seasonality with their foods, but this turns out to be a recent idea. Seasonality may not have been a concern until it became possible to eat foods out of season, as is possible with technology like modern transportation and refrigeration. According to scholar Kumakura Isao, seasonality, while fundamental to modern tea aesthetics, was not so rigidly considered in tea writings before the nineteenth century. Edo-period tea texts, for example, reference foods and flowers that would be out of season in the months they were suggested for use.51 Culinary historian Nakayama Keiko has identified a disjunction in End’s suggestions of certain sweets and their typical seasonality.52 And we can find a similar disconnection between seasonality and some of the other ingredients he uses in his menus when we compare these to contemporary guides to seasonal foods used by chefs, namely, Record of Seasonal Fish, Fowl, Vegetables, and Provisions (Gyoch yasai kanbutsu jisetsuki, listed in table 4 as Record), which reflects perceptions of seasonality and the availability of ingredients during the Kan’ei period (1624–44), and Anthology of Cuisine Past and Present (Kokon ryrish, listed in table 4 as Anthology), published sometime between 1661 and 1673.53 Omitting preserved foods and prepared foods like tofu that were available year-round, the list in table 4 indicates that several of End Genkan’s chosen ingredients for his menu for the eighth month (those indicated with an asterisk) were out of season by contemporary standards.
In this list of ingredients for End’s banquet, nine of the ingredients would have been at their prime when served in the eighth month, but approximately half would have been out of season. Some of these, like pheasant, may have been available year-round but would not have reached their peak flavor, according to the authors of the two seasonal food texts. Even assuming these ingredients were available, it would still be a feat to find all of them in a modern supermarket or gourmet shop, let alone a market in late-seventeenth-century Kyoto or any other city. To obtain these in a form suitable for serving a lord would have been a monumental task, and a worrisome detail that End Genkan uncharacteristically omitted discussing, indicating that, although his representation of the realities of hosting a meal for a lord describes the high points like room architecture and menu planning, it omits the real drudgery of preparing the meal, such as shopping and doing dishes.
TABLE 4 SEASONALITY OF INGREDIENTS IN GUIDE TO MEALS FOR THE TEA CEREMONY, INDICATED BY MONTH
Ingredient |
Record (ca. 1624–44) |
Anthology (ca. 1661–73) |
|
Month |
|
sea bream* |
1st |
10th |
udo shoots |
8th |
8th |
tangerine |
|
8th |
taro |
|
7th–1st |
dried sea cucumber on a skewer |
|
8th–1st |
small shiitake mushrooms* |
4th |
|
dried gourd* |
11th |
|
whitebait* |
11th |
11–12th |
citron* |
9th |
|
crane* |
|
1st–3rd |
salted matsutake mushrooms |
8th |
8th–10th |
eggplant |
|
4th–10th |
shimeji mushrooms |
|
8th |
salmon |
8th |
8th |
sea cucumber |
8th |
8th–1st |
green nori* |
11th |
|
water dropwart (seri) |
8th |
9th–2nd |
oysters |
8th |
8th–3rd |
abalone* |
2nd |
|
pheasant* |
10th |
10th–1st |
water snail (tanishi)* |
1st |
10th–1st |
mioga buds |
|
2nd–5th, 5th–8th |
clam* |
4th |
|
Japanese mustard (karashi)* |
1st |
|
persimmons from Yamato province* |
|
7th |
*Indicates foods that were out of season by contemporary standards.
However, End’s menu is even more complicated. It also lists the dishes for a later meal to take place well after the service of tea and sweets. The so-called after meal (godan) usually consisted of light dishes like noodles. End followed this custom of serving noodles but added more dishes. It seems that, despite all his show of concern about unlucky and unhealthy food combinations, he never warned his readers about overeating, which would appear to be the real threat to his guest. Without knowing the serving size, which End did not provide, it is impossible to know the exact amount of the food to be served, although we can guess from the number of dishes, which were plentiful. Recall, however, that such a repast did not have to be consumed in its entirety. For example, the spiny lobster was a decorative dish. And it might not have been polite, or humanly possible, to eat some if not most of the other soups and snacks in the after meal.
After Meal (godan)
Wheat noodles with ground sesame served with a spoon54
Soup with spicy daikon garnish
Soup of carp with roe, wild seaweed (arame), Japanese pepper
Rice
Simmered dish of
Steamed rice dumplings, dried sea cucumber on a skewer, pickled bracken (tsuke warabi), large pickled plum, Japanese pepper on the stem, accompanied by spiced sake for flavoring
Salad of dried fish shavings in vinegar
Thinly cut abalone, diced conger eel (hamo), carrot, cloud ear fungus (ki kurage), chestnuts in ginger, burdock, bitter melon pickled in the Nara style, udo stalks, dried tofu in the Rokuj style, cherry leaves pressed and dried (sakura nori), dried cod, and wasabi
Grilled small bird on skewers of green wood
Grilled shellfish (watari nishi yaki)55
Soup of freshwater fish (gori), hatsutake mushrooms, small shrimp, persimmon, and citron, in a light soy sauce
Spiny lobster served in the shape of a boat (ebi no funamori)
Lightly simmered burdock in kudzu soy sauce, with ground Japanese pepper
Soup of dark miso with finely ground yam
Squid in ink with strips of ginger
Sake-flavored fish [pieces]
Thinly shredded preserved bonito (yori katsuo), salt-cured fish: salted abalone, salted sea bream, yellowtail, accompanied by flavoring sake
Fan shell (tairagai) on small skewers
Soup of salmon roe, tofu, wheat gluten
Monzuku seaweed in vinegar with finely cut ginger
Grilled dried sardines in assorted colors
Minced greens in salt and vinegar with quick-pickled (asazuke) daikon
Abalone in vinegar
Fish salad with carp and its roe
Flounder with fine leafy vegetables
Soup of wild goose gizzard, mirugai clam, light soy sauce
Wheat gluten simmered in sake with sliced konbu seaweed and pickled plum
Fermented sea cucumber
Dried squid from Goshima [near Nagasaki]
Soup of sliced small turbot with small shiitake mushrooms
Steamed octopus
Though most of the dishes in the after meal do not have artful names, their sheer number is overwhelming. In just this after meal alone, End suggests seven different soups and seventeen dishes. This is twice as many as in the honzen meal earlier in the day.
The after meal seems an endless parade of snacks and soups, but End concludes it with savory tea sweets, tea, and dried confectionery in various forms, beginning with rakugan, a hard sweet made mostly from sugar and a little soy flour.
Tea Sweets
Chestnut flour rice cakes (kuriko mochi)
Hard-boiled herbs
Suizenji nori
Tea—habamukashi variety
Grand wealth of sweets (okashi dairokudaka)
Rakugan
Dry confectionery in the pine green style (matsu no midori)
Dry confectionery in the white snow style (hakusekk)
Wafers (karuyaki)
Round rice crackers (senbei)56
In End’s time, a banquet ended with the service of thick tea (koicha) preceded by “tea sweets,” typically rice cakes, chestnuts, and yams. A thin tea (usucha) followed with its own sweets, called sgashi or atogashi.57 End outdoes these customs with his “grand wealth of sweets.”
End does not provide the recipes to make all these dishes, another detail that reminds us that this is a meal to be read about not created; however, he does provide a list of names of forty-one members of the cooking staff and their duties. Just as he provides key points of dialogue in his descriptions of the plotting of the banquet, he gives names for the top-ranking members of his cooking staff.
Two people in charge of the kitchen (oryrisho sbugy)
Mikami Genta Saemon
Tominaga Yoshirybe’e
One officiator of the kitchen (oryrisho metsuke)
Itoda Jr Saemon
Two officials in charge of sake (osake bugy)
Arikawa Kyshichi Saemon
Inoue Misaemon
with three underlings assigned to them for the duties for sake
Five chefs (ryrinin)
Honsh Tar Saemon
Yamaoka Kichibe’e
Shimokawara Shir Saemon
Kusuno Dennoj
Yoshimura Matasabur
Three people in charge of simmering (nikatayaku)
Shigeki Kyshichir
Moriyoshi Rokusaemon
Hisada Jimbe’e
Three grill chefs (yakikatayaku)
Hara Sbe
Ueda Sakuhye
Hayashi Kawaihye
Two people in charge of making tea sweets
Miyabe Hachir Hye
with two helpers assigned to assist them
Five master chefs (itamae)
Narikata Ichizaemon
Miyagawa Gozaemon
Nagai Matsuhye
Otowa Shzabur
Rintan Saemon
Ten prep cooks
Three people to cook the rice58
The names given to these cooks add a degree of realism to End’s account, as if it did, or actually could, take place. End (or his publisher) even added phonetic markings (furigana) to some of the names so that their correct pronunciations would be known. But modern scholars have identified none of these people. Judging by their names, End did not appear to be paying homage to the great culinary lineages of hchnin, such as the Shij and Ikama. Their names and titles indicate lower-level samurai who would occupy offices such as “head of the kitchen” (daidokorot, gozen bugy) in the households of daimyo or the shogun.59 For End, this may have been a personal tribute to friends or, more abstractly, to chefs, whose names did not usually appear in menus. This list provides more evidence that such a meal would be impossible without such a large kitchen staff of samurai chefs, whose employment would be beyond the capabilities of all but the wealthiest and most powerful daimyo.
End also explains that hosting such a banquet requires much more than just employing cooks: other helpers too were needed. Beginning the day before the lord’s arrival, a group of servants were to be assigned to look out for fires, and two additional servants were to be standing by wearing fire-fighting gear in case any were discovered. He advises constructing a lookout tower from which to spot ruffians and brawlers, and this station would have to be staffed appropriately.60 According to a list he furnishes, two “fight-quieting officers” (kenka shizume bugy) would be needed, with a staff of ten men for support. He further stipulated that two doctors, a surgeon, two masseurs, two Confucian scholars, and various other staff should be employed, numbering 230 people total.61
End provides even further instructions regarding management of these servants, matters of etiquette for the host, and interior design necessary for this single event of receiving a visitation by a lord. However, by this point, readers would probably understand that a task of such complexity was far easier to read about than to actually accomplish.
End’s menu could be appreciated even if it was not attempted in reality. Shij Takashima (n.d.), who compiled the Complete Manual of Cuisine of Our School (Try setsuy ryri taizen), published in 1714, included End’s menu in his collection of hchnin writings annotated for a popular audience.62 He retitled the menu “For a Certain Month, a Certain Day—Ceremonial Menu for a Lord’s Visitation.” This indicates that he recognized it would be best to ignore the seasonal linkage of End’s menu to a particular month—an acknowledgement of the fact that some of the ingredients were unavailable at that time—and instead present it as a timeless model of the highest level of elite cuisine. By including the menu but omitting all of End’s copious directions concerning visitations, the author of Revised Culinary Encyclopedia confirmed that the exacting steps required to create the menu would have been beyond the ability of most people to follow, but that the menu still had value as an idea.
One would expect actual banquets for daimyo to come close to meeting the standards of End’s menu, but in reality these often fell short of End’s standards, further indicating that what he constructed was a culinary fantasy. The culinary history of the Shimazu daimyo house of Satsuma domain in Kyushu is well documented and was analyzed by historian Ego Michiko, and it can serve as a point of comparison for End’s banquet menu. In 1711 the Shimazu hosted a banquet in their castle town of Kagoshima honoring the appointment of Tokugawa Ienobu (1662–1712) as the sixth shogun. The Shimazu and other daimyo had previously celebrated the event in Edo in 1709, shortly after Ienobu assumed his position, but menus from that event have not survived. The festivities in Kagoshima took place after the head of the Shimazu house, Yoshitaka (1675–1747), returned home after serving a year of alternate attendance duties in Edo.63 Ego describes this banquet as “being extremely flamboyant, with rare dishes and ingredients.” The event began with a decorative tray of flattened abalone, presumably for a shikisankon, followed by three trays bearing three soups and nine side dishes. This presentation was indeed lavish, given that daimyo were usually restricted to two soups and seven side dishes,. Unfortunately, a few of the ingredients cannot be identified, and in other places the manuscript is damaged; consequently, some dishes and ingredients are listed here as “unknown.”
Main Tray
Fish salad
Sea bream, perilla, water pepper (tade), ginger shoots, kumquat
Soup
Raw crane, enoki mushrooms, udo stalks, burdock, trefoil (mitsuba)
Simmered dish
Lichen (iwatake), [the characters for other ingredients are indecipherable]
Second Tray
Cypress box
Steamed and simmered fish, dried sea cucumber, [unknown ingredient]
Soup—sea bream, citron, young leaves of Japanese pepper
Salad—matrimony vine (kuko), guinea fowl (horohoro)64
Fresh sushi—small sweetfish, halfbeak, sandborer, scallop
Third Tray
Jmi [unidentified]
Carp with roe thinly sliced, [unknown ingredient], edible bird’s nest (enzu), wasabi, citrus, seasoned sake, spicy vinegar
Soup—[ingredient unknown—some type of green?]
Marinated meat (namakawa)
Small sea bream, [unidentified], chestnuts, Japanese pepper
Side dish—small sea bream
Trays for Passing (hikide)
Grilled dish
Trout preserved in miso[?]
Sea bream served in miso
Soup for snacks—“served with a fin,” fanshell, nori
Snacks—abalone with miso sauce
Decorative Settings (shimadai)
Snacks for taking
Wankiri [unidentified]
Flattened dried sea cucumber
Dried squid
After Meal (godan)
Finely grated preserved bonito
Soup of raccoon dog
Sweets for Tea
Peeled chestnuts [mizuguri], suizenji nori, adzuki bean paste artfully prepared
After Meal Sweets
Persimmons on the branch, gyhi, aruheit, kudzu senbei, matsukaze
Two Varieties of Famous Sake
Sugar Preserves
Dishes Simmered in Soy Sauce
Grilled fowl
Fish cake
Colored sweet potato
Raw [unidentified]
Pickles
Sugar, Rice Cakes, Bean Rice Cakes
[Unidentified] rice cakes
[Unidentified, perhaps small bean cakes and ykan]
Ego points out that the large number of sweets would have been expensive, which indicates a high level for this banquet by the Shimazu daimyo.65 The same is true for the number of trays and rare delicacies. These included the lichen called iwatake, which has to be gathered from the sides of mountains by rappelling down steep cliffs, the Chinese-inspired “edible bird’s nest” (enzu), and the raccoon dog soup, a throw-back to medieval foodways—one that, for better or for worse, does not appear in other extant Shimazu menus.66 In short, this was an example of a luxurious menu dating to shortly after the period that End Genkan wrote about.
However, End Genkan’s menu for a lord’s visit in Guide to Meals for the Tea Ceremony is far more luxurious. Look just at the seafood, for example. Among the dishes that can be identified on the Shimazu menu, there are only twelve different types of seafood; there are twice that number on End’s menu. This is despite the fact that Kagoshima is a coastal city and End wrote in landlocked Kyoto. End’s menu has a greater variety of fish and other ingredients, even considering the few dishes that cannot be identified in the Shimazu menu. Even the sweets on the Shimazu menu—signifiers of wealth and of the domain’s control of the sugar trade with the Ryukyu Islands and Amami 
shima—are nonetheless meager in number and sophistication in comparison to End’s “grand wealth of sweets.”67
GENKAN’S TEA MEALSIn comparison with his description of a meal for a lord’s visit, several of End Genkan’s meals for the tea ceremony from the same volume can be evaluated to see if these would be more feasible for readers in his time to reproduce. After all, tea gatherings would be much simpler affairs, consisting of only a few people and not requiring the painstaking planning and expense of a visit by a lord. End begins the section of tea ceremony menus, which comprise volumes 4 through 7 of Guide to Meals for the Tea Ceremony, with a few general observations about tea cuisine. These remarks are worth reading in their entirety because they suggest how to compose a menu and showcase the author’s wit:
Artful coordination [toriawase] is the most important thing in the cuisine for the tea ceremony. When serving a good soup, the simmered dish should be modest. Think of the assortment of snacks accompanying sake, the side dishes, grilled dishes, salads, sashimi, fish salad, soup, up to the snacks afterward, and then decide the menu. But using only delicacies for a menu will lead to a decline of the power of the tea ceremony. Of course, in the past, things were exceedingly simple: brown rice, a traveler’s soup with grilled, salted sardines in it served on a folksy wood tray. In those days that style was interesting, so the tea ceremony became popular. Today, however, is a period when society is peacefully governed, people have grown fat around the middle, and the cooking of the past is, conversely, not thought to be appropriate to the tea of today. Moreover, if the foods are not well coordinated, they cannot be called a cuisine. Consequently, when creating a menu that accords with contemporary style, take this as advice: it is best to prepare cuisine that harmonizes rare dishes appropriate to the season.
Tea ceremony cuisine abhors fish and fowl with bones. Yet boneless fish and birds do not exist. So, usually the bones are completely removed, even though there are some bones that are fine to leave, albeit it is distasteful to see a dirty tray at the end of a meal. Since there are things that have tasty bones, depending on the dish, it is essential to coordinate their use properly.
There are many types of cooking that utilize a variety of fish, just as there is an abundance of local delicacies, but I am largely ignorant of these. And, depending on the locale, the same fish is called something else. Consequently, it might be possible that the names of the fish in my menus may have different names. Since a locality is likely to have its own particular cuisine, it is difficult to write about them following a single standard. There are also many distinct rules for cooking that one has to follow. That being said, the main point of the cuisine for the tea ceremony is artful coordination, and that is the guiding principle for this book.
When guests are invited, it is essential to include a dish of pickled plum on the menu. Pickled plum cures food poisoning, and it will prevent anyone from becoming gravely sick.
Cooking requires the use of seasonal fowl and fish. If the varieties of greens and mushrooms used do not coordinate with the seasons, they should be avoided. It will cause a great problem if a guest gets food poisoning. This is the rationale for serving seasonal dishes to a guest. When something does not suit the seasons, or if some odd fish or bird is used, the host will be blamed. Of course, if the guest becomes sickened by something else, it will be an inconvenience to the host, and that is worth remembering.68
End found the artful coordination of rare and seasonal delicacies, rather than simplicity, to be the guiding principle for constructing a menu.
His menus for tea begin with the ceremony marking the opening of the tea container, described earlier as the New Year’s celebration for tea students. This was a formal occasion and the menu correspondingly so.
Menu for the “Opening of the Tea Jar” on the Evening of the First Day of the Tenth Month
Sake marinade (sakabite)
Salted salmon, dried cod, fresh yellowtail, thinly shredded preserved bonito
Crane soup
Leg (suji) of crane, daikon, burdock, stems and leaves (kukina), lichen (iwatake)69
Pickles
Small shrimp preserved in salt (hisen ami), pickled plum
Rice
Dishes served in stacked boxes
Upper box—with serving chopsticks
Pickles:
Nara-style pickled bitter melon
Lightly pickled daikon
Lower box—with serving chopsticks
Fish cake cut flat
Sardines from Uwa [in modern Ehime prefecture]
Side dish (hirazara mono)
Large slices of grilled tofu, bonito flakes
Sake
Soup for snacks (atsumono)—oysters, powdered pepper
Snacks
Sea cucumber seasoned in the kodatami style70
Spiced sake for seasoning
Chestnuts and ginger
Sweets for thick tea
Fried “quail’s egg” rice dumplings (uzura mochi)
Suizenji nori boiled in soy sauce
Tea
Sweets for thin tea (sgashi)
Peeled chestnuts (mizuguri) in a blue tea bowl
Tangerines in a deep bowl (donburibachi)
For this and his other tea ceremony recipes, End provides some directions about preparation.
For the crane soup, regardless of whether one is using a raw crane or one preserved in salt, it is important to place one or two pieces of meat from the legs into the soup. Crane soup that does not have the leg meat will cause people to think that some other bird was used; therefore, it is essential to include meat from the leg. As for the other things included, let the occasion determine the arrangement.
Cuisine for a formal tea ceremony requires that the sake marinade be the main dish. Regardless of the variety of ingredients, the marinade signifies the level of formality. It is difficult to prepare the thinly shredded preserved bonito. Prepare it by slicing the center about ten times with a fine blade, then fillet it.
Serving peeled chestnuts [mizuguri] is also important. The methods of peeling the chestnuts include “bridge” [watari], “crossed path” [ikichigai], and “whirl” [tomoe]. These three varieties of chestnut are used for formal occasions.71
Variations of several of these dishes, including the crane soup, appeared in End’s meal for the lord’s visitation, and his notations help clarify how they were to be prepared. The crane soup included a strategically placed piece of leg meat to ensure the crane was not mistaken for a less exalted bird. Likewise the peeled chestnuts needed to be correctly prepared. The use of both dishes indicates that this was a meal intended for a high-ranking warrior. The tea meal utilized ten different types of seafood. Culinary scholar Ebara Kei has tabulated forty-nine different types of fish listed in Guide to Meals for the Tea Ceremony, which she compares to a diary by the lower-level samurai Asahi Monzaemon (1674–1718). His Record from a Parrot’s Cage (mur chki) covers a period from 1686–1717, approximately the same period as End Genkan’s writings. Asahi, who had a one-hundred-koku stipend from Nagoya, took great pleasure in regularly recording his meals, but he listed only sixteen types of fish in his diet over a thirty-year period.72 It should be recalled that End’s banquet menu for a lord contained more than that number of fish for a single meal. End’s tea meal includes nine different types of seafood, marking it as luxurious but on a smaller scale.
Some of End’s other recipes for the tea ceremony may have been more manageable for a samurai like Asahi to reproduce in real life. An evening tea meal suggested for the twentieth day of the eleventh month consisted of a salad of water snail and Japanese pepper; a soup made from dried cod, arrowhead (kuwai), and lichen; a simmered dish of cherry salmon (masu) served with bracken; and a side dish of grilled pheasant and Japanese pepper as the main course. This was meant to be followed by another soup and some snacks, along with tea and sweets.73 Yet even this meal would have presented challenges for a samurai like Asahi to reproduce, given its variety of fish and fowl, although it may not have been impossible for him to make if we compare it to an example from Asahi’s diary. On the twenty-seventh day of the tenth month of 1697, Asahi invited nine guests to dinner, serving them “codfish soup with water dropwart [seri], simmered winter melon with grated yam [tororo], grilled Spanish mackerel [sawara], and pickles.” For snacks to accompany drinks after the meal, he provided “simmered duck meat, sea cucumber marinated in vinegar, salt-cured fish entrails [shiokara], thick slices of simmered burdock root, miso soup with duck gizzard simmered in sake with freshwater nori [suizenji nori], clams [hamaguri], pears, and other things.”74 In short, Asahi managed to create a menu to rival one of End’s tea dinners. This indicates that End Genkan, who wrote about the highest reaches of cuisine, nevertheless did include some realistic menus, revealing that his vision of culinary reality occasionally came down to earth, and that ordinary meals for readers could somehow be connected to extraordinary ones within a larger culinary system that guided the creation of both and prompted people to imagine ever more glorious creations with food.
Later authors of menu collections did not try to surpass the level of detail of End Genkan’s Guide to Meals for the Tea Ceremony, but they did continue to connect ordinary meals with more fantastic ones to indicate that both existed in the same culinary system. This is exemplified by Collected Writings on Cuisine and an Outline on Seasonings (Ryri mmoku chmish). Part dictionary of culinary terms and part recipe collection, this book, published in 1730, contains several model menus in the first of its five volumes. The author, Shsekiken Sken (n.d.), categorized different types of menus under the apt heading “Section on Menus.”
For various menus there are said to be set ways of doing things; abbreviating these, I will mention only the arrangement of the dishes and the disposition of various parts.
For spring, there are three soups and ten side dishes. This is a meal for aristocrats. [These include] snacks for the ceremony of the three rites [i.e., the shikisankon] and the rites themselves, banquet tables, sweets for tea, the after meal, and an afternoon meal.
For summer, there are two soups and five side dishes. This is the plan for an ordinary banquet. Celebrations, weddings, and other ceremonies are included in this category, but I have not set these down.
For autumn, one soup and five side dishes. This is a typical meal.
For winter, one soup and three side dishes. This is a banquet for a tea ceremony. The details of that are omitted.75
Shsekiken’s seasons are a shorthand for different levels of formality appropriate to different classes of people, with the spring banquet for aristocrats being the most formal, and the autumn and winter meals for commoners and tea practitioners the most ordinary. The distance between the “ordinary banquets” and those of the aristocrats is heightened by the abstruse word choice describing the parts of the aristocratic banquet. The shikisankon snacks are idiosyncratically called “hors d’oeuvres” (onkuchitori), a term more typically used in reference to sweets for tea after a banquet. The shikisankon is called “the arrival” (gozachaku), suggesting a courtly name for this custom that commoners are familiar with from their own weddings and other ceremonial occasions.76
The focus on menus alone does not mean that Shsekiken excluded all the things that End Genkan found important to discuss. Shsekiken emphasized the point that cuisine was a holistic pursuit. In his last volume in a section of “various talks” about food and tea ceremony, he writes:
Taste may be the most important thing in the laws of cuisine, but taste is not restricted to just eating with the mouth. Methods of cutting, of preparation, of serving, the interior of the bowls, the serving ware, all of these matters require attention. The host’s attention to hospitality is what the guest appreciates, and it nourishes his spirit. The eyes consume the fine points of a beautiful presentation. The nose eats the wonderful smells, and the mouth and tongue devour the tastes. None of these can be omitted.
Yet he does not abide the cutting tricks of hchnin or any other chefs who take ornamentation to an extreme, calling these “frivolous cuisine” (orokanaru ryri).
Frivolous cuisine, which is so frequently performed, is cutting a chestnut into the shape of a chrysanthemum leaf or making vegetables and fruits into imitation fish and birds. This type of food preparation is wrong. For food preparation to be correct, the proper form of the object is not lost and it can be called unaffected. These matters are a general rule.
Shsekiken compares creating good cuisine to staging a Noh performance.
Cuisine is like a performance by a Noh troupe. First, the menu is like the program for the performance. The fish and fowl, grains, and vegetables are the actors. The best ones for selecting are the ones that must be chosen for the roles. Adjusting the flavoring determines the success or failure of a Noh. That is the most important thing to bear in mind.77
These words must have resonated with readers, for they are adapted in Text for Banquets, the Cooking of Fish and Fowl (Gyoch ryri ky’Osho), published sometime between 1775 and 1794.
With these maxims in mind, we can turn to the model menus, beginning with the one for spring to be served to aristocrats.
Shikisankon Snacks (onkuchitori)
Tray with dried chestnuts, flattened abalone, konbu seaweed
Shikisankon
Simmered dish of various things (zni)—“something with something”
Sake
Soup of something
Snacks of something
Shsekiken provides the basic structure of the ritual service of sake and snacks before the meal, but he omits the particulars of the dishes. The ingredients for the soup, snacks, and zni for the formal rounds of drinks are all simply listed as “something” or “something with something.”
Though the banquet that follows offers a lengthy menu, perhaps even approaching one that End Genkan might conceive of, it nevertheless does not add up to the requisite three soups and ten side dishes stipulated earlier, unless one counts both the pickles and the salt and pepper on the first tray as separate dishes.
Main Tray, served with chopsticks wrapped [in paper]
Fish salad—mixed together:
Halfbeak, cockle (akagai), thinly sliced squid, thinly sliced chestnuts, ginger shoots (hajikami), kumquat as garnish
Salt and Japanese pepper
Pickles
Soup
Dark miso, crane, burdock root, daikon, “bridal [chrysanthemum] leaves” (yomena)
Rice
Second Tray
Sashimi
Carp in long thin slices and with roe, spiced sake, wasabi
Soup—clear soup
Sea bream, citron
Third Tray
Plate of sake-marinated fish
Salted salmon, flakes of preserved bonito
Soup—rice bran miso (nuka miso)
Leafy greens, freshwater clams (shijimi)
Plate of dark soy sauce marinade
Marinated abalone, kumquats, iwatake lichen
Grilled dish
Small sea bream simmered in soy sauce with ginger
Plate of simmered duck with water dropwort and enoki mushrooms
Assortment of grilled dishes
Skylark (hibari), fish cake, dried cod
Pickles: salted fish intestines and arrowhead in spicy miso78
The full menu continues further and includes sake with six snacks and two soups, tea with sweets, an after meal (godan), and another evening meal of two trays and five side dishes followed by more snacks, including decorative presentation trays (shimadai) with spiny lobster in the shape of a boat (Ise ebi no funamori), snipe displayed with its feathered wings (shigi no hamori), and abalone served on its shell (awabi no kaimori)—three specialty dishes of hchnin created for their decorative value that we have encountered before. All in all, this was a meal fit for the nobles it was intended for.
This aristocratic “spring” menu in Collected Writings on Cuisine and an Outline on Seasonings serves as a foil for the other three menus, which would have been much more feasible and within the legal bounds of sumptuary legislation for commoners to emulate. This is true of even the fanciest of the three, the menu for summer, featuring two soups and five side dishes.
Main Tray—[menu for] two soups and five side dishes
Fish salad
Sweetfish with water pepper vinegar (tadesu),79 slices of daikon, gingered chestnuts, chopped udo
Soup—blue heron, garnish (torizukushi),80 broth with miso
Rice
Second Tray
Chilled simmered dish (nizamashi)
Bamboo shoots, wheat gluten in the brocade style,81 pickled apricot
Soup—greens with enoki mushrooms
Grilled dish—shore-grilled sea bass covered in soy sauce82
Salad—salted and fermented fish intestines, dried abalone83
Grilled assortment: quail, flounder grilled with salt
Soup to be served with sake and snacks
Large spiral shellfish, mioga buds
Snack: grilled carp with vinegar and miso
Without the previous menu to compare it to, this one would seem quite stylish in its blending of fowl (heron and quail served in a soup and grilled, respectively) with freshwater and ocean fish. It would have been a luxurious meal for a samurai in this period, in comparison to the meal that the gourmand and low-ranking samurai Asahi Monzaemon served his guests in 1697, mentioned earlier. Asahi presented his guests with only one tray of food, which made his menu less formal, although he did serve a wider variety of snacks.
The one-tray honzen meal for autumn in Collected Writings provides a closer approximation of Asahi’s banquet because of its simplicity: it has just one soup with side dishes.
Main Tray—one soup, five side dishes
Fish and vegetable salad
Horse mackerel, gingered chestnuts, diced vegetable garnishes
Soup of red miso
Daikon with leaves, shimeji mushrooms, small clams
Pickles
Sea bream grilled over cedar with onions and cracked Japanese pepper
Simmered dish—matsutake mushrooms, citron
Grilled dish of quail and sardines
Soup for snacks—razor clam (mategai)
Snack [unnamed]
Though simple, this still has three more side dishes than Asahi’s meal. Moreover, the dishes themselves have a wider variety of ingredients, some of which, like the matsutake mushrooms and the sea bream grilled over cedar wood, were considered delicacies. Whereas samurai Asahi documented what he actually ate, cookbooks such as Collected Writings on Cuisine and an Outline on Seasonings offered only a few model menus, which reflected more of an ideal than a reality, especially since they included elaborate meals intended for aristocrats.
Later collections of menus—despite being published for an audience that included samurai, commoners, and even wealthy peasants—continued to include a range of different menus, some of which would have been impossible for all but the social elite and wealthiest to create. The anonymous Four Seasons of Menus (Shiki ryri kondate), published after 1750, which should also be noted for its collection of southern barbarian recipes, followed a format similar to that of Collected Writings on Cuisine and an Outline on Seasonings, presenting menus of different levels of sophistication. These menus appear in volume 1. Volumes 2 and 3 of this three-part work are dedicated to recipes. The menus in volume 1 follow a plan similar to but more complicated than that of Collected Writings on Cuisine, with menus arranged according to the four seasons and further subdivided by high, middle, and low rank. Thus the “Ode—or Section—for Spring” (the word for “section” being written with the Chinese character for “ode,” fu) contains nine menus, three for each rank, high, middle, and low. The three ranks themselves are further subdivided into three divisions, each with a different number of soups and side dishes. Thus the three highest-ranking menus for spring are a honzen meal of three soups and eleven side dishes, another one of two soups and seven side dishes, and another of one soup and five side dishes. The introduction explains this system:
The aim here is to record representative menus divided according to the four seasons. In accordance with the seasons, beginning the section for spring one can take the arrangements for banquet trays as models for simple improvisatory meals, creating menus using fish and fowl from the highest rank. Or one can add a low-ranking fish to a middle ranking [menu], or a middle-ranking ingredient to an upper menu; or one can select the clams used in the first soup for the second soup, or the clams in the second soup for the third soup. Being mindful of seasonal delicacies, one puts everything together this way. Generally the highest-ranking menus are in a traditional style in this collection. This follows accepted practice.84
In other words, the author has determined that some seasonal ingredients have a certain natural rank and has assigned them to high-, middle-, or low-ranking menus accordingly. Thus, the higher-ranking menus feature more rarified ingredients appropriate for elite dishes. As an example, the dishes from the highest-ranking menus for spring include a fish salad made from sea bream, sliced chestnuts, green onions, water pepper, and kumquats; sushi of sweetfish and spiny lobster; and soups of sweetfish, bracken, Japanese butterbur (fuki), bamboo shoots, and young leaves from Japanese pepper. Despite this rigid way of associating certain dishes with a specific level of formality, the author invites readers to adjust the menus according to their own whims.
While the book promises a range of menus from the highest of the high to the lowest of the low, even the lowest-of-the-low menus are refined, containing one soup and three side dishes followed by an additional soup and several snacks. For example, here is the lowest-of-thelow menu for summer:
Fish salad
Raw sardines washed in cold water, skinned and finely sliced mioga buds, water pepper, perilla, green peppers on the stem
Soup
Grilled flatheads (kochi) and other small fish, eggplant, fresh Japanese pepper (aosansh)
Pickles
Rice
Sushi of fresh fish [unspecified]
Grill in the “shore-grill” style of flathead with salt topping and ginger
Clear soup of fresh sardines with their heads removed
Snack of shaku in hot water with salt85
The last dish is cryptic. Shaku might refer to shako, meaning mantis shrimp, or it could be Shakajiru, literally “Buddha’s soup,” made from sardines, daikon, and mioga.86 The latter seems more likely, given the ingredients. A soup with a romantic name helping to disguise the fact that the menu contains three dishes containing sardines.
Four Seasons of Menus does not explicitly state that its highest-ranking menus are necessarily better than the lowest, but the ingredients that form the basis for this ranking certainly are different when one compares the sardines used repeatedly in the lowest menus—a fish also used for fertilizer in the Edo period—to the spiny lobster served as sushi in the highest-of-the-high menus. Thus, Four Seasons of Menus translates an economic and political reality, in which the highest-ranked ingredients are beyond the status or purchasing power of some individuals, into a culinary system. Though reflecting and perhaps even helping to perpetuate inequality, the text at the same time presents that reality to all its readers, who can at least intellectually consume any rank of meal regardless of their own social positions and ability to create these meals. This guided journey through model menus allows readers to be mindful of seasonal delicacies throughout the year—to recall the pairing of fresh mioga with water peppers in the spring or to imagine what other higher-ranking delicacies might taste like when cooked together. The ideal presented is one that all readers can aspire to and, certainly, fantasize about.
The author of Four Seasons of Menus told readers that they could substitute ingredients freely, but Quick Reference to Menus (Hayami kondatech), published in 1834 by Ikeda Tritakashi (n.d.), provided an even freer format for composing menus of different complexity, one that depended on a clever system of numbering certain dishes. Dishes in this book are assigned a number, either three or five, indicating whether they were to be used in a menu of three or five side dishes. This allowed the reader to quickly compose a menu with the requisite number of appropriate dishes.87
However, an even more imaginative way to consider putting together a menu appears in Fish Trap of Recipes, published in 1760. The term fish trap in the title puns the word for “selection” (sen), which would be a more suitable choice for a recipe collection. The author, Yamakawa Kabutsu (n.d.), who also went by the name Master Humbug (Mushakusha Shujin), shows that he is willing to go to almost any length to provoke a smile if not a laugh from his readers. His level of familiarity with food preparation suggests that he may have been a tea master but not a professional chef.88 The author writes in the introduction:
I have worked in a job related to cooking, but all I did was remember the flavors of the things I ate. Since I lack the skill to prepare food myself, when I think about it, it would look bad for me if I invented special dishes. It’s simply better to hire cooks who specialize in simmered dishes and in adding flavoring.89
Culinary scholar Harada Nobuo characterized Fish Trap of Recipes as a menu collection written for people who leave cooking to chefs.90 Indeed, the work contains the proclamation “Leave cooking to the people who specialize in it; that’s what they are for.”91 That advice is worth remembering when viewing some of Yamakawa’s less appetizing recipes.
What the Fish Trap lacked in terms of practical cooking advice it more than made up for in fanciful content for its menus. Each of its four menus is attuned to a specific theme: a series of Noh plays, a performance of the puppet theater, a menu composed of takeout dishes, and a menu for an imagined pilgrimage to Ise shrine, a popular destination for travelers in the Edo period. The menu for the visit to Ise begins with suggestions for decorating the house to look like a dwelling of a shrine priest (onshi) to set the mood for the meal, which seems to be the purpose of the work’s composition. “This Fish Trap of Recipes,” explains the author, “is not about cooking; it is instead just a manual for someone seeking to create fanciful menus.” By create, the author means write, since cooking was something meant for specialists. In his creations, the author departs from previous models for menus. “I thought to create something new. People who are looking for menus that have long been in use should turn to other works instead.” The newness that author Yamakawa embraced was a trend that he had noted in devising menus inspired by Noh, kygen, and the puppet theater to delight guests.92 His Fish Trap offers a few of his own creations using these themes.
Recalling the author’s caveat that this work is not about cooking prepares readers to consider the clever ways the author pairs food with other cultural pursuits. His menus do not follow the format of a honzen banquet. Instead, Yamakawa adopts different structures, as in the case of his “Menu for a Performance of Noh Plays,” which imitates a Noh program. A typical Noh performance in Yamakawa’s time included five plays, beginning with an auspicious deity play; followed by a play about warrior ghosts (shuramono); a play that takes an elegant aristocratic woman as it subject; a “fourth-category play,” which includes works with exciting turns of plot; and a thrilling fifth-category play featuring demons and other supernatural subjects. These Noh were interspersed with comedic kygen, which focused on the travails of characters drawn from daily life in contrast to the serious themes of the Noh dealing with loves and tragedies of the great heroes and poets of classical literature. Yamakawa’s menu follows this format closely, although for a conclusion he substitutes a more sedate fourth-category play for a raucous demon play.93 He presents his menu like the program for a Noh performance, with the ingredients appearing underneath the plays, as if the vegetables, fish, and fowl were the principle actors in these dramas (table 5).
TABLE 5 MENU FOR AN END-OF-THE-YEAR PERFORMANCE OF NOH PLAYS
a The deity play Kamo relates the encounter of a traveling priest with a woman who turns out to be one of the patron deities of Kamo shrine in Kyoto. White dumplings (shira tama) are mentioned in the play Kamo. Another name for these dumplings is mitarashi, which, when written with different Chinese characters, is the name of the basin or river used for purifying oneself before entering a shrine. The text of the play describes autumn leaves flowing in the river’s water; the menu has tiny dumplings floating in sweet syrup.
b Shachi is one of the few plays that mock professional chefs: in the play a priest seeks employment as a chef, and a chef enters the same household seeking a position as a priest. They end up trying to teach each other their former trades before being discovered by their irate employer. The “shore-grilled” sea bream is a dish that one of the characters mistakenly contrives in the play.
c On the outskirts of Eguchi village, travelers meet a woman who tells them about the famous courtesan Eguchi no Kimi buried nearby. The woman reveals that she is the ghost of the courtesan, and returns in the second half of the play to dance while giving a Buddhist lesson.
d Three Handicaps (Sannin katawa) features another trick played on an employer, who believes that he is hiring three servants with physical infirmities; they are in fact healthy individuals with a shared friendship and fondness for gambling. When the master surprises their gambling party, they mistakenly adopt each others’ disabilities. According to the text’s modern editor, the sea cucumber, flatfish, and blowfish fins represent the three infirmities: a cripple, a blind man (indicated by a fish with oddly placed eyes), and a deaf man, respectively.
e Benkei in the Boat (Funa Benkei) covers an episode in the escape of the mythical warrior-priest Benkei and his master, Yoshitsune, fleeing from the persecution of Yoshitsune’s brother, Minamoto no Yoritomo. Arriving at Daimotsu Bay, Benkei convinces Yoshitsune to leave his lover, Shizuka no Gozen, behind before embarking. Their boat enters a storm, and the spirit of the dead warrior Tomomori appears and attacks them, but he is ultimately driven back by Benkei’s spiritual show of force. This dish puzzles the modern editors, who suggest that the cockles or the sword bean (natamame) signify Benkei. The fact that these ingredients float in a soup recalls Benkei’s boat.
f Religious Dispute (Shron) portrays the struggle between two priests of different sects who first try to convert one another and then struggle to drown out each other with their prayers. The play ends with the pair becoming friends after each mistakenly says prayers from his former rival’s sect. On the menu, two different methods of preparing octopus are struggling against each other. Kant simmer (Kant ni) is another term for oden, a variety of things like octopus, egg, and vegetables simmered together and removed from the stock to be eaten hot. Nakamura, Shinban Nihon ryri gogensh, p. 174.
g Yamakawa, Kondatesen, pp. 59–60.
Comprehending a menu like this requires a large amount of explication that readers in the Edo period familiar with Noh either would not need or would enjoy puzzling over, perhaps with their published scripts of Noh plays in hand. The menu also requires a high threshold for puns. To cite a few examples, the first kygen, The Letter I (I moji), relates the story of a warrior who travels to Kiyomizu temple to look for divine guidance in taking a wife. He dreams of a woman near the temple gate and sends his servant to investigate. Before disappearing, she reports that she is from Ise, but the forgetful servant cannot remember more than the “letter I” from the word Ise until assisted by another traveler. Yamakawa’s menu references the play by including spiny lobster, known as Ise ebi in Japanese. In another kygen-inspired dish, two different ways for cooking octopus compete like the two feuding priests in the play Religious Dispute.
In the Noh Sanemori, the ghost of the title character appears to a priest to explain how he dyed his hair to appear younger before entering battle. This is referenced by the dyed seaweed used in the accompanying dish. Looking further down the menu, the modern editors of Kondatesen suggest that the egg yolk in the strange dish for Eguchi references the golden autumn leaves mentioned in the play. However, the form of a circular slice of daikon covered in dark bean paste with an egg yolk presents a nice image of a moon, which also figures prominently throughout the play, as in the opening lines: “The moon has always been to me a friend.”94 Or, the daikon hiding behind the bean paste could signify the white ghost of Eguchi. Clearly the ingredients are meant for their visual effect, because daikon, sweet beans, and egg yolk would not be combined for their taste.
The dishes selected for the play Kantan, which is about a man who falls asleep in an inn and dreams he has become the emperor of China, are paired with a passage in the play sung by the chorus to accompany the protagonist’s dance: “So the seasons turn before my eyes. / Spring and summer, autumn, winter; / Trees and grasses bloom within a day.” This passage comes at the end of the man’s dream before the innkeeper rouses him with the words “Wake up traveler! The millet is ready for your meal! Get up now, get up!” In place of millet, other delicacies are offered on this menu, and the round of three drinks references fragments of verse from the same dream-dance in the play: “falling snow,” “dawn moon,” and “spring flowers.”95 While some of the humor might be lost on modern readers who need all these explanations, the wit of the author of Kondatesen can still be appreciated for the way he has made the poetic use of food comment on a program of Noh plays and vice versa.
The menu collections explored in this chapter may vary in their treatment of their subject, but they share the fact that they are less like shopping lists and guides for actual meals and more like poems written to evoke other things: the dining habits of the elite, the change of seasons, or Noh drama. The menus demonstrate ways that those who wrote about food borrowed from and participated in larger cultural trends ranging from the elite tea ceremony to popular pastimes like shrine pilgrimage and the puppet theater. Meant to be read, the menus not only evoke food but also provoke the intellect and stimulate the aesthetic sense in multiple ways. Despite the fact that some menus may never have been made into meals, they nonetheless stand as expressions of and guides to the way food can be appreciated as a cuisine, which, like dishes in a ceremonial banquet or in the knife ceremonies of hchnin, did not have to be eaten to be enjoyed.
