Japanese Hamo: Pike Conger, Kyoto Summer, and the Bone-Cutting Art
Inland Sea (Seto Naikai), associated with Kyoto Gion Festival cuisine (July)
Hamo (pike conger, Muraenesox cinereus) is Kyoto's quintessential summer fish—a seemingly paradoxical choice given that Kyoto is landlocked, but hamo's remarkable ability to survive long transport in oxygenated water made it the preferred fish for ancient Kyoto's imperial court, which could not receive most seafood alive from the coast. The fish has survived through Kyoto summers to become inseparably associated with the Gion Festival (Gion-matsuri) of July, and pike conger is sometimes called 'hamo no matsuri-mono'—the fish of the festival. The primary culinary challenge with hamo is its extraordinary bone structure: fine intramuscular bones that are too numerous and complex to remove by hand using standard techniques. The solution is honegiri (bone-cutting)—a specialized knife technique where the fillet is placed skin-down and the knife makes a series of extremely fine, close-spaced cuts through the flesh in a precise rhythm, cutting the bones without cutting through the skin. A skilled kanreki (chef of 60+ years) can make 26 cuts per inch; a professional standard is 15–18 cuts per 2.5cm. After honegiri, the scored fillet is briefly blanched (shabu-shabu style) in boiling water, causing the cuts to open into a white chrysanthemum-like bloom—an iconic preparation called hamo no otoshi (hamo shabu) that is served with plum sauce (baiku-su) or umeshu-based tare.