Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto - Softcover

Riccardi, Victoria Abbott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 076790852X ISBN 13: 9780767908528

Verlag: Crown, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Two years out of college and with a degree from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, Victoria Riccardi left a boyfriend, a rent-controlled New York City apartment, and a plum job in advertising to move to Kyoto to study kaiseki, the exquisitely refined form of cooking that accompanies the formal Japanese tea ceremony. She arrived in Kyoto, a city she had dreamed about but never seen, with two bags, an open-ended plane ticket, and the ability to speak only sushi-bar Japanese. She left a year later, having learned the language, the art of kaiseki, and what was truly important to her.

Through special introductions and personal favors, Victoria was able to attend one of Kyoto’s most prestigious tea schools, where this ago-old Japanese art has been preserved for generations and where she was taken under the wing of an American expatriate who became her mentor in the highly choreographed rituals of this extraordinary culinary discipline.

During her year in Kyoto, Victoria explored the mysterious and rarefied world of tea kaiseki, living a life inaccessible to most foreigners. She also discovered the beguiling realm of modern-day Japanese food—the restaurants, specialty shops, and supermarkets. She participated in many fast-disappearing culinary customs, including making mochi (chewy rice cakes) by hand, a beloved family ritual barely surviving in a mechanized age. She celebrated the annual cleansing rites of New Year’s, donning an elaborate kimono and obi for a thirty-four-course extravaganza. She includes twenty-five recipes for favorite dishes she encountered, such as Chicken and Egg Rice Bowl, Japanese Beef and Vegetable Hotpot, and Green-Tea Cooked Salmon Over Rice.

Untangling My Chopsticks is a sumptuous journey into the tastes, traditions, and exotic undercurrents of Japan. It is also a coming-of-age tale steeped in history and ancient customs, a thoughtful meditation on life, love, and learning in another land.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

VICTORIA ABBOTT RICCARDI has written for the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and Bon Appétit. She lives with her husband in Newton, Massachusetts.

Aus dem Klappentext

Two years out of college and with a degree from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, Victoria Riccardi left a boyfriend, a rent-controlled New York City apartment, and a plum job in advertising to move to Kyoto to study kaiseki, the exquisitely refined form of cooking that accompanies the formal Japanese tea ceremony. She arrived in Kyoto, a city she had dreamed about but never seen, with two bags, an open-ended plane ticket, and the ability to speak only sushi-bar Japanese. She left a year later, having learned the language, the art of kaiseki, and what was truly important to her.

Through special introductions and personal favors, Victoria was able to attend one of Kyoto s most prestigious tea schools, where this ago-old Japanese art has been preserved for generations and where she was taken under the wing of an American expatriate who became her mentor in the highly choreographed rituals of this extraordinary culinary discipline.

During her year in Kyoto, Victoria explored the mysterious and rarefied world of tea kaiseki, living a life inaccessible to most foreigners. She also discovered the beguiling realm of modern-day Japanese food the restaurants, specialty shops, and supermarkets. She participated in many fast-disappearing culinary customs, including making mochi (chewy rice cakes) by hand, a beloved family ritual barely surviving in a mechanized age. She celebrated the annual cleansing rites of New Year s, donning an elaborate kimono and obi for a thirty-four-course extravaganza. She includes twenty-five recipes for favorite dishes she encountered, such as Chicken and Egg Rice Bowl, Japanese Beef and Vegetable Hotpot, and Green-Tea Cooked Salmon Over Rice.

Untangling My Chopsticks is a sumptuous journey into the tastes, traditions, and exotic undercurrents of Japan. It is also a coming-of-age tale steeped in history and ancient customs, a thoughtful meditation on life, love, and learning in another land.

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1.

Walking the Roji

I celebrated my arrival in Kyoto with a dinner of grilled eel, a sublime delicacy in Japan. In the water the fish resembles a ferocious jagged-toothed snake. But when sizzled over hot charcoal it looks like a fillet of sole that has spent the winter in Palm Beach. The skin turns crisp and smoky and the fatty white flesh, basted with a sweet soy syrup, becomes deeply tanned and as succulent as foie gras.

The restaurant was located in a cheery yellow mall beneath Kyoto Station, home to the southern bus terminal, north-south subway line, and Japan Railroad Tokaido Main, one of the four major bullet train routes. Being coatless and having underestimated how cold it gets in Kyoto in early November after the sun goes down, I had ducked into the mall in search of warmth and something to eat.

The restaurant lay at the end of a long corridor lined with inexpensive clothing emporiums, elegant Japanese sweet shops, and trinket stores selling sandalwood fans, pottery tea bowls, and I Love Kyoto key chains. Like all the other eateries in the area, the eel restaurant displayed lifelike plastic models of the items on its menu in a brightly lit picture window. I chose a small wooden table for two in the back of the restaurant and sat down in the chair facing the kitchen. I was the only diner. The chef, sporting a clean, pressed, white cotton band around his forehead, came over to my table. He was apparently also the waiter.

"Are you kmrmshtka?" asked the chef.

"Hmmm?" My eyebrows shot up.

"What would you nsmsplka?"

I giggled nervously, then bit my lower lip. He gestured to the window and started walking. I followed him outside. "Unagiijxwbrp?" he asked. I began to tell him I wanted the tray holding the single, not double, fillet of grilled eel with rice, soup, and pickles, but he interrupted.

"No English," he said with a frown, shaking his head. I tapped my finger several times against the glass in front of the dinner I wanted, hoping he might make the connection.

"Ah, ah," he exclaimed, pointing at the glass, "Unagixpxwz." I squinted and leaned toward the window to read the plastic plaque marked with the meal's price in yen, then slowly wrote the price on my palm with my index finger and tapped the window again.

"Hai, hai." He beamed, nodding vigorously. "Kirin?" Now, that I understood.

"Yes," I said loudly, as if increasing the volume might lead to an increased understanding.

"Ladzkmttaka?" He opened his hands as if holding an invisible fire hydrant from top to bottom.

"Yes!" I boomed, not having the foggiest idea of what he had just asked.

The double-size beer arrived quickly, along with a glass. It wasn't one of those huge Henry the VIII steins like we get back home, but instead a teensy tumbler, similar to what budget hotels in America use for juice glasses at their complimentary breakfast buffets. I filled the glass and took a sip. The amber liquid tasted bitter and refreshing.

After about ten minutes, dinner came to the table looking identical to its plastic counterpart. Unfortunately, the eel's texture was similar too. But the accompanying steamed rice, pressed into the shape of a chrysanthemum, had a clean, delicate sweetness unlike any rice I had ever tasted. The tray also held a plastic bowl of miso soup, clear in parts and cloudy in others. I stirred the mixture with the tip of my chopsticks, then picked up the bowl and sipped the savory liquid enriched with diced tofu and emerald wisps of wakame seaweed.

In a shallow dish sat a small block of bean curd splashed with soy sauce and topped with pinkish curls of dried bonito that looked like pencil shavings. I cut into the silky white cube and tried to balance the craggy chunk on the slender pieces of wood. It tumbled off. After trying again, success was rewarded with the sweet taste of milky custard mingled with dark soy and smoky fish flakes. There were pickles too, crisp neon-yellow half-moons of sweet daikon radish and crunchy slices of eggplant. Although I had not expected culinary brilliance from a mall restaurant, dinner was exceeding expectations. The ingredients were plain, but exceptional in their purity and freshness.

As I moved around my tray--sipping, plucking, and crunching--I thought of all I had seen that day. Exotic images flashed to mind, including the painted orange gates of Yasaka Shrine, shaped like giant croquet wickets. There were the streetlights, heralding safe crossings, which chirped "uh-oh" for north-south foot traffic and "wheesh-wheesh" for east-west. Ginkgo trees fluttered banana-yellow leaves shaped like tiny fans against the turquoise sky. Red and white vending machines, clustered near subway stations, glowed brightly with offerings of beer, batteries, and cans of hot sweet milk tea. In a tiny noodle shop near Tea Bowl Lane, where pottery shops flanked both sides of the street, I joined mothers, children, and old men to slurp thick starchy udon noodles from a bowl of savory fish broth. At Kiyomizu-dera (Clear Water Temple), a massive wooden structure looming over the city against a backdrop of vermilion maples, I stepped inside the main hall to see the female Buddha of Mercy and Compassion. Fabricated from gold, she stood on a pedestal waving her "thousand arms" in a dark room with slippery wooden floors and smoky air pungent with the musky sweet smell of incense. Afterward I drank cold clear water from an aluminum ladle at the Sound-of-Feathers Waterfall below the temple with a crowd of boisterous schoolchildren, then sampled a green tea butter cookie at a gift shop in the mall beneath Kyoto Station. Even the beer with dinner tasted new to me, cleaner, crisper, and less fizzy than what I was used to back home. It had been a day of pure exhilaration, an unexpected adrenaline rush in anticipation of the thrilling, unpredictable, hopeful promise of Kyoto--my new home.

I first became enamored with Japan through my grandmother, whom we fondly called Gunga. She and my grandfather used to travel to this chain of islands that looks like a chopped chili pepper floating several hundred miles off the coast of Korea. Kyoto was my grandmother's favorite city "because of the gardens," she used to say. Kyoto is the place to see mossy miniature landscapes, groves of bamboo, and raked stone oceans circling jagged rock islands.

Every Christmas my grandparents would bring back gifts from their travels to "the Orient." One year it was a wooden boy in a blue-and-white-speckled coat holding a painted persimmon. Another year it was a red silk change purse. The Christmas I was ten, my mother, two sisters, and I received flowered Japanese happi coats. These were knee-length cotton wraps similar to kimonos that we would wear around the house as bathrobes. Mum's was peach, my older sister's was pink, Alexandra's, the baby of the family, was white, and mine was a rich robin's egg blue. I loved that little robe and used to hang it on a peg inside my closet door. When I opened my closet, the robe would swing out and remind me of this exotic place called "the Orient."

The discovery of my own Orient began in college when I took several East Asian studies courses, including "Contemporary Life in Japan," taught by a young Japanese woman. To accompany her lectures she showed slides of a recent trip to Kyoto. Unlike Tokyo, which had become a modern westernized metropolis, Kyoto had been spared from bombing during World War II, so it still had all its original temples and shrines. It represented the old Japan, and in the professor's slides people still wore kimonos. Red paper umbrellas stood outside teahouses, and the family's traditional old home where...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 076790852X
• ISBN 13: 9780767908528
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland