Shizuo Tsuji and Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art

Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art was published in 1980 by Kodansha International in Tokyo, New York and London, with the assistance of Mary Sutherland and an introduction by M. F. K. Fisher. Its author, Shizuo Tsuji (died 1993), wrote it as a teacher of the cooking of his own country for readers who had no Japanese kitchen to learn in.

Shizuo Tsuji's book is the foundation on which this library rests, and it is arranged as a course of instruction rather than a collection of recipes. It opens with the Japanese meal and its order, then passes to ingredients, utensils and knives, to the selecting and cutting of fish, chicken and vegetables, and to dashi, the basic stock from which soups and simmered dishes proceed. Only after these foundations does it turn to the making of soups, to slicing and serving, and to the dishes themselves. The sequence carries its own argument: a cook who understands materials, tools and stock will understand the cuisine, and the recipes follow from that understanding. The book appeared when, as its early reviewer Craig Claiborne observed, there was little serious writing on Japanese food in English, and he judged that Tsuji filled that gap with distinction. Fisher's introduction, affectionate in tone, presents Tsuji as a friend and as a teacher with a considered theory of his cuisine. He held that its union of subtlety and simplicity had helped sustain Japan through a century of social change, revolution, war and cultural invasion. Even imported fast food, in his view, could not displace a bowl of udon so long as the noodles remained as honest as the broth around them. That conviction explains the book's tone. Fisher records that Tsuji and his peers warned, on television and in university halls, against the slow spread of shoddiness in eating, and she places his book among works written stubbornly and proudly by people who cannot let a national taste falter and die. Tsuji was nonetheless no antiquarian: Fisher notes that he was fond of ice cream and bought a costly Western machine to make it. The authority of the book lies in this double character, rigorous about the traditional ryōri and open to the wider world. For the cook using this library, Tsuji is the reference to which other authorities are compared. Where later authors write from the farmhouse, the home kitchen or the restaurant, his book supplies the professional grounding in technique, from the handling of the knife to the making of stock, and it remains the standard by which the craft of the Japanese kitchen is described.