Introduction

 

One of my challenges in studying cuisine in early modern Japan has been to develop a strategy for reading centuries-old cookbooks. Mastering arcane vocabulary was only the beginning of that task. Another task was to enter both the world of the medieval chef—who recorded details about feasts and the ceremonial uses for food for a select audience of professionals accustomed to terse notes jotted down one after another—and the world of early modern food writers, who wrote extensively about banquets and recorded recipes for a popular audience that was not necessarily concerned with how to cook. Fortunately, I discovered something in my own family archives that helped me interpret far older Japanese texts.

My grandfather kept two binders of recipes he clipped from newspapers and other places, but the outer covers of the brown volumes do not offer any clues to their contents. He wrote “Appetizers, Soups, Chowders, Casseroles, Meats” on the inside cover of one book, and the organization of the first sections follows this format, each part separated by typed labels he inserted into colorful plastic tabs. Other plastic tabs divide later sections of the book into poultry, eggs/cheese, fish/shellfish, and pasta/pizza recipes. He organized his second book in the same way, but instead of a table of contents on the inside cover of that volume, I found a clipping listing “America’s Star-Spangled Cooking,” a top-ten list that begins with Philadelphia Pepperpot (no. 1) and ends with Lady Baltimore Cake (no. 10). He cropped the recipes in these binders narrowly, making it impossible for me to know where most of them came from, but easier for him to glue more of them on both sides of a piece of paper.

Flipping through the pages of recipes makes me wonder what they reveal about the person who collected them. How did he decide what to include? Did he actually cook all these dishes? Which were his favorites? Are these the dishes he ate regularly or the ones he saved for special occasions? I cannot ask him these questions, because he passed away more than thirty years ago, when I was too young to remember his cooking.

I searched for any Japanese recipes among them, knowing that my grandfather traveled extensively in Japan. Judging by the pictures and other details, most of the recipes date from the 1950s and 1960s, meaning they preceded the current American interest in Japanese cuisine by several decades. However, I did find a few recipes for sukiyaki. One of these is a clipping from the Azuma Sukiyaki Restaurant in Chicago, which promises “unusual food and the exotic atmosphere of ‘Old Japan.’ ” The advertisement continues: “Dishes such as sukiyaki, tempura, and teriyaki are prepared at your table by a kimono-clad hostess while you sit on low cushions on the floor (western seating is available).” Yet the Japanese dishes are few and far between in this collection. In the same section containing the lone sukiyaki recipe, there are three recipes for Swiss Steak on one page and another page with seven different recipes for spareribs. Most recipes are simply information about preparations and list of ingredients, but others, like the one for sukiyaki, are more generous to the reader’s imagination. They supply details such as information about the restaurant where the dish is served; a sketch or photograph of the dish; or the name, photo, and address of the winner of “Today’s $5 Favorite Recipe” contest sponsored by the Chicago Tribune. There are some passing references to cooking and serving food. One recipe for French Dressing begins: “It is practically impossible for any cook who serves a distinguished green salad to come up with an otherwise indifferent meal. Another recipe tells us: “Elizabeth Jackson likes this Chinese puff because it is fairly simple to prepare and ideal for lunch or supper.”

Reading my grandfather’s recipes helps me understand the composition of culinary writings in Japan from the fifteenth through the late nineteenth centuries. Like my grandfather’s books, these Japanese works reveal little about the authors beyond what we can infer from the texts. Works written before 1600 were private records. Like my grandfather’s binders, they were handmade journals not meant for a wide audience, and most were less well organized than his book. Many of the printed works that appear after 1600 follow a mode of organization similar to that of my grandfather’s book, categorizing recipes by method of preparation or ingredient. Like him, the authors freely borrowed from other sources without attribution, which people today would call plagiarism.

My grandfather’s recipe collection suggests changes in American tastes in the last fifty years, but the recipes in Japanese cookbooks written before the late nineteenth century reveal an even greater sense of distance from modern eating habits. Culinary books published in the Edo period (1600–1868) contain recipes for tempura, sushi, and sashimi, which are the signature pieces of modern Japanese cuisine, but there are also recipes that call for crane, dog, cooked duck served with its feathered wings reattached, otter, and other ingredients we would be hard pressed to find in any Japanese restaurant within or outside of Japan today. Medieval culinary texts and early modern ones also contain directions for elaborately carving raw fish and game fowl to make inedible culinary displays rarely if ever seen in modern Japan. Banquets also gave prominent place to specific foods and delicately constructed dishes that could not be eaten because of the form they were served in, which would be anathema to Japanese restaurateurs today. Additionally, the style of eating described in these texts is different from modern ways of eating. Instead of sharing a table with other diners, which was a foreign custom adopted during the Meiji period (1868–1912), people ate from several trays of food served to them individually.

Cooking, eating, and thinking about food have changed so much in the last century and a half in Japan that most experts have come to view Japanese cuisine as completely modern. The native words for “Japanese cuisine” (washoku, Nihon ryri) date only from the late nineteenth century, when Japan was attempting to modernize and militarize to compete with other countries.1 The Japanese cuisine that gradually took shape in this period blended native and foreign cooking styles, but it was more than a revolution in cooking. It included new attitudes toward food that identified cooking and eating with “an imagined national identity and cultural homogeneity.”² Japanese cuisine, in other words, was the product of the fusion of native and foreign cooking methods and of a new recognition that food represents a country and reflects the common values, preferences, and habits of the people in it. For example, sukiyaki can represent “the exotic atmosphere of ‘Old Japan’ ” despite the fact that it was invented in the late nineteenth century and incorporates beef—an ingredient prominent in Western cooking but not widely consumed in Japan before then.

The conclusion that Japanese cuisine is something modern prompted a question that led me to write this book. If Japanese cuisine is modern, does this mean that premodern Japan did not have a cuisine? Reading the works of other scholars, I learned that there are several ways to answer that question, and I review these in the first chapter of this book. Nevertheless, after conducting my own research on this topic, not only did I grow dissatisfied with these answers, but I also recognized that I was asking the wrong question. There could be no premodern equivalent to modern Japanese cuisine if cuisine was defined as something that reflected a national identity that simply did not exist in the premodern era. Consequently, I rephrased my question. If modern cuisine is a way of associating preparing and consuming food with the idea of a homogenous national identity, what meanings did these activities have in the premodern period? In answering this new question, I also realized that it would be better to try to discern the character of premodern cuisine for its own sake, not simply as a precursor to modern cuisine, so I have concentrated on documenting premodern cuisine and have left the description of the transition to modern cuisine for another time.

I found that the best way to approach the question was to examine writings about food: the culinary texts written in the late medieval period (1400–1600) and the culinary books published in the early modern era (1600–1868), the types of books mentioned earlier. The authors of late-medieval culinary texts were all professional chefs, literally “men of the carving knife” (hchnin), who created meals for the ruling elite, the aristocracy of the imperial court, and high-ranking samurai such as the shogun. There are approximately a half dozen of these writings that survive from the late medieval period. Published culinary books from the early modern period number more than nine hundred different texts and include works by hchnin but also by authors from more diverse backgrounds, such as tea masters, chefs called itamae who worked in restaurants, and other gourmands. We might call the latter the foodies of the Edo period: they may not have been professional cooks, but they were fans of eating well.3 In the absence of premodern-era records such as collections of menus from restaurants, better statistical information about diet, and other sources available to modern scholars of foodways, culinary writings provide the best indication of how culinary professionals and the audience of readers and diners thought and felt about food.

However, as I indicated earlier, culinary writings have certain limitations and offer certain challenges as sources. We usually (but not always) know the names of their authors and their dates of composition or publication, but often that is all we know about these texts. The personal lives of their authors, and the economic class and social status of their readership, have to be inferred from the texts themselves and what we know in general about reading habits, literacy, and the publishing business during the period. But while more detailed information about the authors and readership would be desirable, a lack of knowledge about these should not prohibit us from reading and interpreting these writings.

What these books reveal is that there was a sophisticated understanding of cuisine as an intellectual and artistic practice, which began in the medieval era and culminated in the early modern period. Instead of referencing nationalism, chefs and authors of culinary writings demonstrate that food can be used to evoke other things. Food can demonstrate artistry, sophistication, status, and authority. It can reference martial values, remind diners of marital virtues, and perhaps serve as a magical way to instill these. Food can reference poetry, landscape, topography, and geography, and be used to make witty puns. Food can also be a type of voyeurism, allowing readers to experience pleasures denied them due to insufficient wealth and by law. In other words, before Japanese food referenced the imagined community of the nation, highly developed culinary rules allowed chefs, diners, and food writers to use it to imagine other things. These ways of thinking about food gave rise to modern Japanese cuisine in the same way that earlier cooking methods informed modern ones. But these culinary rules were not created as simply precursors to something else: they are important in their own right as expressions of human creativity and of the development of an advanced system for attributed meanings to preparing foods and consuming them. Thus, cuisine in early modern Japan provided the means for fantasizing with food, and gave me the title for my book. Although the sources for this book include materials from the late medieval period, which corresponds to the Muromachi (1336–1573) and Momoyama eras (1573–1600), the chronological limitation noted in the title of this book—“early modern”—recognizes that trends that began in earlier centuries culminated in the early modern period, which corresponds to the Tokugawa, or Edo, era.

Recounting the sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural changes that occurred during the late medieval and the early modern period would require an additional book, if not several, and these details have already been laid out in standard historical surveys. For our purposes we should recognize one important historical continuity affecting the culinary profession, as well as another critical development that had a major impact on the spread of culinary knowledge. Until the appearance of food stalls, which gave rise to restaurants by the late seventeenth century, the only professional chefs were the hchnin, who worked for the ruling military and aristocratic elites. In the transition from late medieval to early modern Japan, the nature of their employment remained the same, but the fortunes of their patrons changed. The Ashikaga shoguns, who at their most powerful identified themselves in foreign correspondence as kings of Japan, and who may have even contemplated supplanting the imperial line, saw their spheres of power decline after the devastating nin War (1467–77) and the subsequent Warring States period (1477–1573) relative to the rising power of regional warlords, called daimyo. Some chefs turned to these new regional power holders for patronage, while others remained loyal to their masters at the court and military government (bakufu); in either case, through the sixteenth century, these professional chefs practiced their art for only the highest levels of society.

Even in a new era, when the Tokugawa warrior government finally restored order to the country, the types of culinary practices described in this book found their highest expression in warrior and courtly circles until the end of that period. A new class of chefs working in restaurants that catered to a popular clientele did their best to emulate the elite culinary experts. In contrast to this continuity, the rise of the publishing industry in the seventeenth century dramatically changed the methods of maintaining and disseminating knowledge in many fields. For cooking, it meant the popularization of elite culinary knowledge and the creation of new genres of cookery texts for a wider audience. The enduring peace of the Tokugawa period, the increase in urban populations, and the diversification of the economy are among the developments that supported a publishing industry.

THE HISTORY OF FANTASIZING WITH FOOD: FROM MAGIC TO METAPHOR

Fantasizing with food began when medieval cooks incorporated ritual elements into meals in order to distinguish special practices of cooking and consumption from their mundane counterparts. These ideas endured and found full expression in ceremonial cuisine (shikish ryri) served to the political elite. Then, in the early modern period, the culinary practice of working magic by physically manipulating food shifted to an art of turning food into metaphor, whereby actual cooking and dining became less important and dishes became associated not simply with their capacity to generate weighty spiritual energies but also with their ability to evoke aesthetic qualities and fun. Where medieval foodways centered on the art of not eating actual food and on the mystical implications of that, early modern cuisine was an art of consuming more than just food, including the social status and poetic associations of certain dishes, and these could be enjoyed by eating an actual meal or by simply reading about one.

So, beyond all the customary ingredients and time-honored modes of preparation dating from the medieval and early modern periods, which still inform cooking in Japan today, the ability to make food signify something invisible was one of the primary goals of premodern cuisine and an important contribution to its modern counterpart. Yet it is vital to remember that chefs, banqueters, gourmands, and other foodies of the early modern period delighted in this signification for its own sake: how, for instance, food could reference historical episodes, beautiful places, or the change of seasons, or speak to a warrior’s prayers for victory and a safe return home. They did not conceive of food as fantasy as something “premodern,” or as lacking anything. Instead they delighted in ambiguity, contradiction, and multiple levels of meaning in their food fantasies.

Food was an essential ingredient in this fantasy, and to provide a sense of how chefs in late medieval and early modern Japan imagined working with it, I have furnished extensive translations of period recipes and menus. These help illustrate the diversity of premodern cuisine, which featured dishes like spiny lobster presented in the shape of a boat (ebi no funamori); raw salads (namasu) composed of seafood combined with fruits, vegetables, and a vinegar dressing; and miso soups that combined fowl like raw crane with burdock, daikon, leafy green vegetables, and lichen—three dishes among many that are distinct from typical dishes in modern Japanese cuisine.

I examine the development of Japanese cuisine in seven chapters. Chapter 1 presents how I came to understand that cuisine existed in premodern Japan, and that it was about what was not eaten, or could not be eaten, as much as it was about what was actually consumed, and the significance of that. I discuss previous research on Japanese foodways, as well as cuisine in other historical settings and the ideas of a few contemporary chefs working in Kyoto, Japan’s present-day self-proclaimed “culinary capital.” As this chapter indicates, my study owes a debt to the research of scholars within and outside of the Japan field for helping me formulate this approach. However, the writers I introduce who have focused solely on historical changes in cooking and serving food have missed the key point that Japanese cuisine is as much an intellectual and aesthetic project as it is one of production and consumption.

Chapters 2 and 3 examine the work of the most elite culinary experts in late medieval and early modern Japan, the hchnin. Hchnin traced their lineages and art back to the earliest periods of Japanese history, but their vocation crystallized in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when they formulated distinct styles of food preparation and began to write treatises on the culinary art. Hchnin performed two principal duties. The first, described in chapter 2, was to demonstrate their culinary skills in a banquet entertainment called the “knife ceremony”(hch shiki or shikibch). In front of an audience the hchnin sliced large fish and fowl, turning them into the equivalent of flower arrangements of meat and flesh. These were not meant to be consumed but were visual displays that had an important religious purpose. Chapter 2 describes these ceremonies and their influence on cuisine. Chapter 3 turns to the hchnins’ other responsibility, banquet preparation. Hchnin borrowed from traditions of religious offerings and warrior custom to create a ceremonial cuisine distinguished by the inclusion of foods that, by their shape, mode of creation, or the context, were not meant to be eaten immediately, if at all. Instead, they were intended to be appreciated in ways spiritual and artistic, which would then reflect these qualities on the food’s creators and the host and guests of a banquet.

The transition from a ceremonial cuisine created by hchnin for the elite to a popular cuisine delighting commoners is the topic of the next three chapters. chapter 4 focuses on a collection of recipes inspired by Iberian foodways, allowing me to consider ruptures in the old culinary practices that were facilitated by the introduction of foreign ingredients and cooking techniques, as well as domestic developments such as the rise of a publishing business that produced different types of culinary books for a wider audience. (I describe these new types of culinary writings in chapter 5.) Besides new cooking techniques and ingredients inspired by foreign foodways, Chapter 4 also introduces the innovative ways that developed to conceptualize foods crucial to the rise of a more popular cuisine.

Chapter 5 is a preliminary evaluation of published culinary books and acts as a prelude for the next two chapters, which explore the two major subcategories of these writings in closer detail. The earliest culinary books helped to disseminate elite banqueting styles and dishes, but later ones, from the mid-eighteenth century onward, developed new ways to fantasize with food that included recipe books of fictional dishes and imaginary banquet settings. Scholars characterize cookbooks published in the late Edo period as having been written for amusement (asobi), meaning these texts are less grounded in the reality of the mechanics of cooking and dining than earlier culinary writings. “Amusing” texts, for example, offer recipes with witty names and describe imaginary banquet settings. However, this generalization fails to recognize that even the earliest published cookbooks contain recipes and meals that were beyond the capacity of most readers to create, making them equally as playful as later examples of culinary writings. Thus most if not all culinary books published in the Edo period represented cuisine as an object of aspiration or escapism, like literature, rather than a representation of actual eating habits, which for most of the population in this period remained exceedingly dull and restricted by sumptuary laws.

Chapter 6 explores the use of menus found in published collections in the early modern period as vehicles for the imagination. Rather than describe what people actually ate, menus in culinary books expressed what the elite desired to consume and what commoners aspired to have. Authors of these works, like contemporary playwrights, walked a fine line between realism and fiction, but the goals for cuisine nearly always dictated that they think beyond the conventionally possible and consider the utmost potential for food, providing readers with a voyeuristic fantasy of a world where culinary pleasures could be granted, comparable to what contemporary novelists offered in their depictions of love in the geisha districts.

Chapter 7 indicates that, by the end of the Edo period, culinary writers, if not inventing the names of dishes first before determining the ingredients, were at least giving fantastic titles to their creations—such as Solid Gold Soup—to find pleasure in the associations such names conjured. These dishes reveal the extent to which cooking had become an intellectual practice, if not a subcategory of fiction, by the end of the early modern period. And this turned the medieval formulation of cuisine on its head. Rather than use food shaped and presented in special ways to draw out spiritual and aesthetic qualities in a ceremonial context, as hchnin did, the authors of early modern cookbooks simply added poetic names to dishes that evoked desired associations and could be consumed as food or as literature. In other words, early modern chefs transformed the serious practice of culinary magic into a playful use of language.

The conclusion addresses the idea that the definition of cuisine in premodern Japan was more heterogeneous than the definition of modern Japanese cuisine. Premodern cuisine also accommodated individuals seeking to transcend the mundane, either by participating in the pleasures of word games or by reading descriptions of banquets for the shogun and imagining themselves in attendance. Cuisine could be a fantasy that allowed one to mentally escape the strictures of rigid social control, or it could simply be a way to make preparing food and eating it more fun.

My intent in creating this book has not been simply to piece together snippets of other works, as in my grandfather’s recipe book. Instead I have sought to reveal the underlying assumptions that guided food preparation and consumption in late medieval and early Japan, assumptions that, although much more diverse than their modern equivalents, nonetheless provided profound and creative guidelines for working with and thinking about food, and that are exciting in their own right. Where else would we learn how to make solid gold soup, carve a fish into an abstract shape signifying longevity, turn chestnuts into symbols of warrior power, eat a program of Noh plays, and imagine ourselves having dinner with the shogun? Even more interesting than such singular dishes is the culinary system that facilitated these and many other fantasies with food.