The Kaiseki Lineages and the Tea Schools

The kaiseki table descends from the meal served before the tea of the chanoyu gathering, and its history is bound to Kyōto, where the tea schools took their form from the sixteenth century. Sen no Rikyū, the tea master who died in 1591, gave the tea meal its discipline of restraint, and the later schools that bear his lineage, the Urasenke, Omotesenke and Mushakōjisenke, carried that discipline forward into the Edo period and beyond.

Shizuo Tsuji, who founded his school of cookery in Ōsaka and whose book Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art is the principal authority of this volume, treats kaiseki as the summit of the Japanese table and as a cuisine whose character was set by tea. The word kaiseki, in the sense of the tea meal, describes a modest repast of soup and a few small dishes served so that the guest may drink thick tea without discomfort. In Rikyū's conception the meal was to be prepared with care, served hot while hot and cold while cold, and composed of what the season offered, with nothing contrived beyond the needs of the guest. This ideal of restraint is the root from which the later kaiseki grew. The meal that is now called kaiseki, written with characters that differ from those of the early tea meal, took on the multiplied courses of the formal banquet as it passed into the hands of the ryōtei, the restaurants of Kyōto and elsewhere where the cooking of the tea house and the older honzen and kaiseki feasts were drawn together. Tsuji describes the progression of such a meal, from the opening appetiser and the clear soup through the sashimi, the simmered, grilled and steamed dishes, to rice, pickles and a miso soup, and he treats the order as one of balance in method and in flavour rather than as a fixed rule. The sequence of cooking methods and the care given to the vessels, the cutting and the presentation are the visible marks of the school. The tea schools and the cooking schools are separate institutions that share a sensibility. The tea schools hand down the forms of the gathering through a hereditary headship, while the cooks of the ryōtei and the shokunin, the craftsmen who give a lifetime to a single discipline, hand down technique through long apprenticeship in the kitchen. Tsuji's own school, founded to teach professional cooks, set that transmission into a formal curriculum, and his writing carried the principles of the Kansai kitchen, among them the primacy of dashi from kombu and dried skipjack and the light seasoning that leaves the ingredient itself clear, to a wide readership abroad. Kitaōji Rosanjin, the potter, calligrapher and gastronome who died in 1959, belongs in this account as a figure who insisted that the vessel and the food form one composition, and whose own restaurant and kiln made that conviction concrete. The Edo-period ryōri-bon, the printed cookery books, among them the Ryōri Monogatari of 1643 and the Tofu Hyakuchin of 1782, show how the knowledge once held within households and temples entered print and reached a larger public. Together these texts, the tea lineages and the professional kitchens form the inheritance on which the later authorities of this book draw.

The kaiseki table is built on dashi of kombu, Saccharina japonica, and dried skipjack, Katsuwonus pelamis, with seasoning kept light so that the character of each seasonal ingredient remains clear. Tsuji describes a meal of small portions in which the clear soup sets the standard of the kitchen, and in which the varied textures and cooking methods of the courses are weighed against one another, ending in rice, pickles and soup.