Japanese Farm Food and the Farmhouse Kitchen

Nancy Singleton Hachisu — Japanese Farm Food is a book of the Kantō plain, written from a working farmhouse in Saitama Prefecture, where vegetables, rice, soy beans and a few animals are raised on the same land that supplies the table. The author is an American-born cook who married into a farming family and learned the household repertoire from the women of that family, and the book sets that repertoire down as the everyday cooking of a rural Japanese home rather than the cooking of the restaurant.

The book belongs to a lineage distinct from that of Shizuo Tsuji, whose Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art explains the kaiseki and ryōtei tradition, its dashi, its knife work and its order of courses, to a cook who wishes to master a refined and codified cuisine. Hachisu writes from the other end of the country's food: the kitchen in which the season, not the menu, decides what is cooked. Her chapters follow what the land gives, so that a surplus of one vegetable becomes pickles, miso-dressed dishes, simmered side dishes and soups, and the preserving of the harvest is treated as part of cooking and not as a separate craft. The pantry she describes is that of a household that makes much of what it eats. Miso, shōyu, umeboshi and pickles in rice bran are put up in the farmhouse itself, and the dishes are built upon them. Rice is the centre of the meal, and the other dishes are arranged around it as accompaniments in the manner of the ichijū sansai, the soup and three dishes, though she does not insist on the formal pattern. Dashi appears, but plainly and economically, and many dishes rely on the savour of fermented seasonings and on the vegetable itself. What the book contributes to a reference library is a record of method as it is practised at home: quantities that a family can cook on a weekday, techniques such as salting, blanching, simmering in a seasoned liquor and dressing with sesame or miso, and an insistence that freshness and timing matter more than ornament. It stands beside Elizabeth Andoh — Washoku and Hiroko Shimbo — The Japanese Kitchen as a postwar home-cooking authority, and beside Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat — Japanese Soul Cooking, but it is the one most firmly rooted in a single farm, a single locality and a single family kitchen. Read against the history of Japanese cookery, the book shows how far the kaiseki table and the farmhouse differ in intention while sharing a base of rice, soy, seasonal vegetables and fermentation. The refined tradition of Sen no Rikyū and the tea schools turned restraint into an art; the farmhouse arrived at restraint through necessity and abundance. Together the two accounts give the cook both the formal standard and the domestic ground from which it grew.

The farmhouse meal is built on rice, with a soup and several small dishes of vegetables that are salted, simmered, dressed or pickled, so that the flavour rests on miso, shōyu and the vegetable itself. The table is plain and seasonal, and the character of each dish changes with the month in which it is made.