The Ryōri Monogatari and the Edo Cookbooks

The Ryōri Monogatari (料理物語), printed in 1643, stands at the head of the Edo-period ryōri-bon, the printed cookery books that carried the table out of the household and the guild and into the hands of any literate reader. It belongs to the first century of Tokugawa peace, when the cities of Kyoto, Osaka and Edo were growing and a reading public had formed that was eager for practical instruction. The Tofu Hyakuchin (1782), a book devoted to a single ingredient, belongs to the same tradition and shows how far the genre had matured by the later eighteenth century.

The Ryōri Monogatari is organised by ingredient and by kind of preparation. It treats fish, fowl, vegetables, soups, simmered dishes and the like, and the plain arrangement of its recipes shows that it was written to be used at the stove and not merely read. Its significance for the history of Japanese cooking lies less in any single dish than in the fact of its printing. Knowledge that had passed from master to apprentice, and from household to household, now existed in a form that could be copied, compared and argued over. The later ryōri-bon built on this footing. Some described the formal table, others the cooking of particular towns, and others, like the Tofu Hyakuchin, took one humble ingredient and showed how many dishes it could sustain. A book of this kind testifies to a cuisine that had become conscious of its own craft. Shizuo Tsuji, in Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, belongs to the long line that these books began, for he too writes to make a cuisine of the exacting ryōri-ya and the home alike available to a reader who has not trained in a kitchen. His account of the cuisine rests on the same conviction that the old books show in practice: that the best cooking begins with ingredients of the finest flavour and texture, and that presentation is a large part of the dish. He observes that the flavour of Japanese food is purposely not masked by anything stronger than a touch of dashi or shōyu. The restraint he describes is the quality that the Edo books preserved and handed on. Tsuji also notes that vegetables developed their own cuisine under Buddhist influence, the elegant vegetarian cooking called shōjin ryōri, and the ryōri-bon and the teaching of the Tsuji school stand in the same relation to it: each takes a body of cooking that had been guarded within a few kitchens and sets it down in order, so that the whole structure of the cuisine can be seen.

The cooking these books describe is built on quiet means: dashi, shōyu and ingredients chosen for their natural aroma and texture. To a palate used to rich sauces made with butter, flour and meat juices it may at first seem thin, yet Tsuji asks the reader to look for the subtle flavour of the ingredient itself. The Edo cookbooks, with their long lists of preparations for one fish or one bean curd, show the same principle at work: variety is sought through method and not through heavy seasoning.