The Postwar Home-Cooking Teachers

The postwar home-cooking teachers belong to the decades after 1945, when the Japanese household kitchen had to be rebuilt after wartime rationing and shortage. Their work was done in cookery classes, in printed books and in the pages of women's magazines, and it took shape mainly in the cities of Tōkyō and Ōsaka. Elizabeth Andoh, in Washoku, writes of the home kitchen as the place where the cooking of Japan is kept and handed on, and she studied in the Tōkyō of this tradition.

The teachers of this period stand between two worlds that the book treats elsewhere: the professional table of the kaiseki and ryōtei kitchens, and the daily meal of the family. Their task was to carry the principles of washoku into the ordinary house without the apprenticeship of the shokunin. They taught the making of dashi from kombu Saccharina japonica and dried skipjack tuna Katsuwonus pelamis, the seasoning of simmered dishes with shōyu, mirin and sake, and the habit of building a meal from rice, soup and several small dishes. Andoh's Washoku follows this method of teaching, setting out the foundations of the cuisine as a coherent system that a household cook can learn and repeat, and presenting seasonality as a discipline of the kitchen rather than a decoration of the table. Their books and classes also fixed a repertoire. Simmered dishes such as nikujaga, the egg dishes, the grilled fish, the dressed vegetables and the pickles were written down with measures and sequences, so that a young cook away from her mother's house could still cook as her mother had. The authority of the teacher replaced, in part, the authority of the grandmother, and the dishes were standardised in the process. A cook who reads these teachers as history should therefore read them as a record of what the Japanese home table was understood to be in the middle of the twentieth century, and not as a record of every regional practice. The relation to professional cooking was one of borrowing in both directions. Shizuo Tsuji, whose Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art explained the methods of the professional kitchen to a wide readership, gave the home cook a reasoned account of technique, and the home teachers drew on the same stock of principles while simplifying the equipment and the labour. Later authors, among them Hiroko Shimbo in The Japanese Kitchen and Nancy Singleton Hachisu in Japanese Farm Food, describe a household cooking that still rests on this inheritance, while Hachisu turns equally to the rural kitchen and its preserved and fermented foods. The lasting value of these teachers to a reference library lies in their method. They treated a dish as a set of reasons: why the dashi is drawn gently and not boiled hard, why the seasoning is added in an order, why the rice is rested. Where Andoh gives an instruction, the reason accompanies it, and that habit is what makes her book usable as an authority on the home kitchen. The postwar teachers made that habit common, and in doing so they secured the continuity of the domestic table through a period of great change.

The table these teachers described is the ichijū sansai meal: rice, soup and three dishes, with pickles, arranged so that flavours, textures and cooking methods differ from one dish to the next. The base is a clear dashi, and the seasoning of shōyu, mirin, sake and miso is kept restrained so that the ingredient in season remains the subject of the dish. Andoh's Washoku describes this balance of tastes and colours as the working aim of the home cook.