The Japanese Kitchen as a Reference

Hiroko Shimbo's The Japanese Kitchen belongs to the postwar tradition of Japanese authors who set the cooking of their country down in English for cooks working outside Japan. It stands among the authorities of this book beside Shizuo Tsuji's Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, and it draws on the same ground: the Japanese pantry, the seasonal calendar and the household practice that the kaiseki table and the home kitchen share.

Shimbo's book is arranged by ingredient rather than by recipe, and that choice is the reason it serves as a reference. Each chapter takes up a staple of the Japanese larder, among them rice, soy sauce, miso, dashi materials, seaweed, noodles, tofu, fish and vegetables, and describes what it is, how it is made, how it varies and how it is kept and used. A cook who consults it learns the materials before the dishes, which is the order in which a Japanese kitchen is in fact learned. The method is consistent with Tsuji, who also began from the pantry and the knife, and with Elizabeth Andoh's Washoku, which arranges the same knowledge around the ideas of the home table. The book is useful on the foundations of the cuisine. Dashi is treated as the base of nearly everything: the kombu, Saccharina japonica, and the dried skipjack tuna, Katsuwonus pelamis, that make the first stock, and the way the second stock draws what remains. Shōyu, miso and mirin are presented as fermented products with grades, regions and uses, and the cook is taught to choose among them for the dish in hand. Shimbo also describes the tools of the kitchen, the knives, the grater, the rice cooker and the earthenware pot, with attention to what each does that another cannot. As history, the book records a particular moment: the Japanese home kitchen as it was understood by a cook trained in Japan and writing for readers abroad, at a time when the pantry could finally be bought outside the country. In that respect it sits with the postwar home-cooking authors whom this book treats as part of the history of the cuisine, alongside Nancy Singleton Hachisu's Japanese Farm Food, which comes from a rural household, and Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat's Japanese Soul Cooking, which comes from the everyday dishes of the noodle shop and the izakaya. The three together show that the cuisine is carried as much by the household as by the formal table of the kaiseki lineages, the tea schools and the ryōtei, with their shokunin craftsmen. The practical value of the book to a reader of this library is its restraint. It names the ingredient, gives its Japanese name in romanisation, explains its purpose and leaves the cook to proceed with confidence. Where the dishes of the kaiseki table depend on the same dashi, the same seasoning and the same respect for the season, Shimbo supplies the common ground on which those refinements are built. It is therefore cited in this book for the pantry and its principles, and other authorities are cited for the dishes that rest upon them.

The table that Shimbo's book describes is built on a single base of dashi, seasoned with shōyu, miso and mirin, and served as rice with soup and a few dishes of fish, vegetables and tofu. Its flavour rests on the clean savour of kombu and dried skipjack tuna and on the changing of the seasons, so that the same materials are arranged differently from one month to the next.