Yama-zakura, wild mountain cherry trees, grow tall and wide. They highlight the hills in spring, their white cherry blossoms and green leaves emerging in tandem. Here in the countryside they signify this season as much as the glorious pink blossoms that rain petals onto the heads of drunken revelers.

A thing to behold

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Sakamoto san emerged from the sea in a black wetsuit trawling a large harvest of shin-wakame. The lobe-leafed new spring algae spilled from nets belted to his waist. Already in his sixties, he was the eldest of a group of male ama, free divers with a name that roughly translates to sea warriors.

Within the Day

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The days lengthen and we grasp any break in the weather to walk the country roads and gather warabi, the sprouts of bracken fern. Warabi are mysterious creatures that emerge with necks bent deep and infant fronds clasped like a raptor’s talon.

The Softer side
of spring

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I’ve always found great beauty in the layered gestures of movement at the table. The graceful handling of utensils shows reverence for and ensures the longevity of carefully crafted utensils. 

A matter
of manners

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I drove down the mountain, my mind fully absorbed in what I was rushing towards. I came around the familiar bend at the end of the bamboo grove and drove straight into the blustering burn. It delivered me from my distraction and right into what might be my favorite moment of the year.

Spring Burn

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The stately magnolia tree better indicates the season’s progress than any date on a calendar and so I watch it closely because when it’s in full bloom I know that the wild watercress is at its prime. Watercress appears as the first bountiful leafy green of the year.

A Wild Feast

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The hills around here are thick with horsetail and just about every year I stumble onto a new patch. I can now tell you where they emerge first, and on what side of what stretch of road you’ll find the plumpest stalks. But then again, foragers don’t divulge their sources.

There is No Limit

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At its essence, washoku it asks the cook to be fully attuned not so much to the ingredients of a country or culture but to the ingredients of a time and place. Mine is a table built of oak, not a counter made of cypress. Here the sparkle of late winter stars is as close as we come to Ginza’s glitter. 

A dash of spirit

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Tsukudani, an intensely flavored condiment to eat with rice, is an excellent way to preserve an abundance of something and an equally good solution for ingredients that are beyond their prime.

The cadence
of the day

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A party of songbirds splash about in a flooded pot of dormant water lilies. Their giddy chatter never fails to brighten my day. But today is already a bright day. The sun beams from a clear sky as if to celebrate this first day of a new seasonal year according to Japan’s lunisolar calendar.

The first day

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Fukinoto season came so early this year. The new year had barely dawned and we were already harvesting. I’ve made the most of the season, fashioning dishes from these bitter buds in concert with the stages of a seasonal ingredient.

A Myriad of
small measures

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Drawing back a clump of desiccated fronds, I find an emerald trumpet of delicate leaves cradling a cluster of button like buds. I raise the dirty, wet stem to my nose and drink in the earthy, pungent aroma of spring breaking from winter. This is fukinoto.

an auspicious day

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If Kuniko, my mother-in-law, were to write the story of her life it might read more as a menu than a memoir. 

if you ask her

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Last week I had my first Kasieki lesson and in a single day we covered several extraordinary dishes. We cooked with ingredients I’d never encountered before, like dried zenmai, wild Asian Royal ferns, and itowarabi, made of the powdered root of bracken ferns. 

Commencement

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I still remember my first months in Japan vividly, that feeling of being thoroughly lost in a foreign sea of language, customs, and community. And I vividly recall the one thing that evoked a sense of companionship, that anchored me and would come to define my life here, Kuniko’s cooking. 

The best cook of all

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It’s the season for me to harvest my daidai little by little to make batches of marmalade. But with temperatures set to plunge, I've decided to harvest all the fruit at once and save it from freezing on the tree. So now I have baskets upon baskets of them waiting to be processed. It’s a delightful challenge.

The greatest cold

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When you marry into a family, you marry into their food. No matter who we partner with, there are just some dishes that come along with them, ones that seem to bring comfort in a way that bespeaks a meaning deeper than the sum of its flavors.

A judicious endeavor

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Japanese cuisine celebrates hazawari, the texture or literally tooth-feel of foods, to which the language is full of words to describe the textural aspect of flavor. It speaks volumes to the sensual aspect of eating and to how wholly immersed and attentive people are to what they eat.

The language of flavor

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The flesh of a turnip is white as winter but the skins, matte and silken, have a warmth to their character. When I crave a bit of elegance, I’ll carve away the outer rinds to reveal a six sided orb and simmer the peels with a bit of salt until all of the flavor is extracted, then simmer the turnips in the broth.

One reliable redress

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As long as we’ve kept track of time, the day on which we reset the calendar has been celebrated as an occasion for reflection, for mental, physical, and spiritual renewal. I place a tray at each seat and moments before we begin set out chopsticks fashioned by hand from the freshest bamboo. 

Gratitude & Devotion

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Each day throughout the month of December, I’ve retrieved a small bamboo tray from the entryway and set it outside. On it rest nine yubeshi wrapped in white cloth. These citrus shells stuffed with miso and nuts have bathed in the winter sunlight, curing in the cold air until leather hard and ready to eat. 

On the savory side

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After hours around the table and a feast of many flavors, I pour a tasting of this sweet elixir. It runs a tawny syrup and as potent as a port. Unctuous and silken, rich and intense, it hits the nose and tongue with a cascade of flavors calling to mind soy, sherry, caramel, dried fruits, maple syrup, and balsamic.

An opulent choice

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Homes are turned inside out in the days before the dawn of the New Year when the gods will be invited in. When all has been tidied, organized, washed, and wiped, we hang shimekazari, talismans made of wara, rice straw, to please the gods and usher good luck in with the New Year. 

For the Gods

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As we settle into winter citrus comes calling, bright and cheerful, adding zest and zing to otherwise starchier and heartier fare. I find yuzu intoxicating and feel it should headline a dish that chimes as loud as church bells to proclaim the season. 

The crest
of winter

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Hakusai tsukemono is my favorite Japanese pickle and a firm culinary tradition in our house. Pickles bring vegetables to the table at a time when few are to be found fresh and making hakusai shiozuke is the simplest of endeavors, really.

Of Pickles & Preservation

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In an archipelago of islands surrounded by vast seas, it’s no wonder salt is such an essential ingredient in Japanese cuisine. In winter we sometimes long for a dose of raw vegetables and a salt pickle salad of black radish can be just the helping of fibrous crunch we crave

roots of winter

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A yuzu fruit contains many large seeds and only a little juice, mellow and citrusy like a cross between mandarin orange and meyer lemon. While in season, we use the juice to dress vegetables and salads. But the fragrant peel deserves most of the attention.

Scent of Winter

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Festive persimmons ripen just in time for the holidays. In a season when we set the table with more substantial fare, this salad of persimmon and chrysanthemum greens ressed with a silken blend of yuzu, light sesame oil, a splash of light soy and a sprinkle of salt is a lovely and lively compliment.

A Festive Fruit

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As autumn gives way to winter, we tilt further and further away from the sun towards a season of stillness and shadows. Warmth becomes a singular focus. We light fires in the hearth and bring heartier fare made of roots that sweeten underground to the table.

Stillness & Shadows

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Each stalk of rice is said to hold ten thousand kernels of grain and each one is precious. To leave even a single grain in your bowl is to offend the people and gods who bear witness. But what of the stalk, left behind after harvesting the precious grains? 

The taste of fire

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The season of new rice coincides with a myriad of gifts from the wild that pair perfectly with the sweet nuttiness of new rice from gingko nuts and mukago to the most prized of all growing under cover on the forest floor, matsutake.

Matsutake Memories

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Kuniko dipped her hands in water, then spread a pinch of salt on her palms and took a mound of rice in her left hand. She pressed and turned, pressed and turned, soon turning out a perfect triangle. Making onigiri is an intimate act and homemade ones, laced with love, taste the best.

her hands
remembered

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I think time just might just be the most essential ingredient in good cooking. Because cooking with care takes time. And care — for your ingredients, for your kitchen and utensils, for your guests or family — shouldn’t be rushed.

Labor of Love

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There is perhaps nothing more simple and divine at the Japanese table than a pristine bowl of new rice, to close an autumn meal. Like the wafer at mass, newly harvested rice speaks to the Japanese soul of the divine, of things both eternal and ephemeral.

What has
been sown

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Our Osmanthus tree sends forth thousands of tiny apricot colored flowerets. They burst from delicate stems like tiny fireworks and cast wide a pure and perfect perfume. it tastes just like it smells a friend told me, and encouraged me to make a syrup with the flowers.

Honeyed & sweet

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Like any one of us, Kuniko might let a vegetable languish too long in the fridge and find it limp and withered. But unlike so many of us, her faith in it never wavers. They find their way into her tokozuke  pot and then to the table in an uncommonly beautiful array of tsukemomno pickles.

of tips and tails

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Eggplant in Japan is most delicious. One of my favorite ways is grilled to melt-in-the-mouth perfection, peeled, dressed, and garnished with scallion and katsuobushi flakes. Simple, elegant, and delicious, the trifecta that defines good food.

Clear into Autumn

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Ten months ago, after years of wise guidance by my mother-in-law, a devoted practitioner of elegant and pragmatic home cooking, I took a leap and began studying Japanese cuisine at the next level in earnest with Tsuchiya san, a family friend and former chef in Ginza.

A way of being

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In October great bursts of heat still dazzle at midday but come evening autumn tumbles out to explore the hollows left by wilting ferns and flowers. The season's ingredients lend themselves well to shiraae, a dressing made of tofu, sesame paste and white miso. 

Never for themselves

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Chrysanthemums symbolize the month of September, the season, and the imperial family in Japan. But mums remind me most of autumn in New England where avid gardeners bring them home to enliven a fading landscape. 

Tone and Texture

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 I find chestnuts particularly seductive, the prickly jacket that bursts to reveal smooth glossy shells, the rich eponymous color and strong lines of their gentle curves. Shibukawani preserves the chestnut in its whole and elegant form.

A Cultured confection

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Kuniko walks each day to the end of the driveway where two slight chestnut trees grow. She gathers as many as she can find at her feet and squirrels them away in her freezer where the meat sweetens until she has enough to cook the nutty yellow bits of chestnuts in rice, a signature taste of fall.

This I remember

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I get a thrill when the pink tipped, straw colored, smooth skinned rhizomes of new ginger line the market shelves in early autumn. They arrive just as the air turns cold and our bodies crave its warming effect. They’re beautiful enough to make your heart race a bit. 

a cyclical tempo

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They are gorgeous and plump, with purplish black skin stretched taught over a voluptuous teardrop of flesh. When sliced in half they can make you blush. Figs are the sirens of the fruit family, mysterious, alluring and irresistible.

Sirens of the
fruit family

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Kuniko can be sparse with her praise, but she’ll often praise my dashi which, after all, I learned to make from her. Jouhin, she’ll say, calling it elegant. She adores a broth that offers its flavors but doesn’t insist upon them, discernible but not conspicuous

the last throes

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I dream of chilled chawanmushi served in a bowl of such proportion to rest comfortably in my hand, the foot pressing a cool ring into my palm, the silken custard skimming the throat like a fluttering crepe Georgette fabric grazing the skin.

The spine
of summer

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Even as the sun burned high and bright in the sky, poets of old wrote of autumn blowing in on the hot August breeze. It’s hard to fathom, sitting here at the edge of an azure ocean under a searing sun.

The deepest chord

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The shiso pickled together with umeboshi is called tsukejiso and after its done its duty staining the umeboshi and sealing it in throughout the long journey to maturity, there are wonderful uses for the ume infused salty herb. 

more than
one occasion

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What is the musicality of a meal in Japan? The man asking had always found the convivial cacophony of clinking dinnerware one of the enduring pleasures of a meal. The stillness in my images sparked him to wonder if it was different in Japan.

Musicality of
a meal

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The strand that binds the producer to the cook to the diner is threaded through the eye of the earth and with a more holistic view of food I think we’ll be better stewards of the source of every delicious thing we adore.

THEIR HANDS

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A shiso laced ume sorbet looks like heaven on a spoon and is perfect for these hot and humid days. Last night’s full moon glowed a dusty rose orb on the horizon. If it were up to me, I would rename the the full moon that falls within this doyo drying period, the Plum moon.

The plum moon

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It’s time to check on the ume syrup and extract the fruits from the sweet syrup. It’s time to use up the last of the red shiso juice that’s on the verge of fermenting in the fridge. Which means it’s time to make spent ume red shiso sorbet.

Summer on a spoon

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Summer is full of long days but the season as a whole is fleeting. As we hover at the threshold of major heat, interest in food wanes. It is too hot to think and summer suffocates culinary inspiration, so many a lunch is made of thin, smooth, slippery somen on a bed of ice.

At the threshold

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I’m inclined towards a devotion to beauty and it’s encouraged in Japan. I’m granted permission to consider it essential. If elegance is the only beauty that never fades, as Audrey Hepburn said, then the fine crafts of Japan are elegance defined. Their beauty grows.

Small acts

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We are in for a sultry summer. Bright sun vaporizes gathered moisture and on these muggy days a shot of shincha, the year’s fragrant newly harvested first crop of tea, brewed with ice, cuts through with a moment of cool clarity

A Prelude

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As the temperatures rise I find my self less and less interested in long hours the kitchen. I crave foods that are light and fresh. I crave tall glasses of cold refreshing drinks, green tea in the morning to revive and clarify the mind, and a red shiso tonic in the afternoon to stimulate and hydrate the body.

Sultry & Sweet

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My introduction to washoku through Kuniko positioned me to practice home cooking that is quite uncommon in the modern age. She is at the tail end of the last generation who cooked from scratch, a nationwide band of women who strove for economy without concern for convenience.

Siging praises

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A basket of ripe ume perfumes the house. Their soft fuzzy skins a shade of sunny yellow flushed pink at the shoulders like fair skin that’s been in the sun too long. Though called plums, ume are more closely related to apricots, a fact easily understood when drawing in the ripe fruit’s fragrance.

A Brilliant Hue

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Working by Kuniko's side I scribbled notes on a piece of paper recording amounts, ratios, timing, and sequence. What spurred me to finally document the details of making umeboshi just months before a stroke would render those very details inaccessible in her mind?

A day's Work

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For the last 8 years I’ve captained the umeboshi ship. Year by year I’ve been setting a new course with slight adjustments and alterations. A recipe is only an arrow pointing you in the right direction. From there the pathways are many, some well trodden and some to be carved anew.

Alkaline King

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June is a month of sweet pleasures. After the hustle of staying warm all winter long, and the sprint through spring, we slow down at the start of June, if not in body, at least in mind. This season feels sweetly languorous with light that lasts so long and air that grows humid and warm. 

Sweet Pleasures

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My latest edible fascination is junsai, the unfurled leaf of water shield, an aquatic herb gathered towards the end of May. It’s a common starter dish at Japanese restaurants but rarely eaten at home. Like many foods in Japan, this one is celebrated for its texture more than its flavor.

Where it grows

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Jellies are light, refreshing, and infinitely variable. They are neutral and friendly to delicate early summer flavors like spruce tips, honey, and mugwort and beg for seasonal garnishes. They close a meal without weighing you down. 

Grounding
into summer

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I’m as smitten with this dish for its flavor as I am for its construct. At the table the leaf is unwrapped and a sweet, nutty, roasty aroma rises with the steam of perfectly juicy fish. So elegant. So basic. Primal and perfect.

Primal & Perfect

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Green drops of early summer line the shelves in May, peas of all kinds, snow, snap, and garden, some bedded down in their pods, others shucked loose. They are sweet and tender, the same rainbow of youthful green as the flora all around.

A more resonant flavor

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There is an urgency to May. Flowers bloom in abundance and the bees are so very busy. They collide with moths and butterflies, all out to feast on the plethora of pollen. Songbirds sing at dawn and dusk and chatter all the hours in between. 

purple days
of may

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We press our palms together and say grace in a single word, itadakimasu. As the five syllables pass our lips we pronounce I humbly receive. It’s a deep and far reaching phrase that illustrates how sitting down to a meal in Japan is intimately and equally tied to the physical and sacred, to spirit and faith.

Itadaku

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Summer has felt slow to arrive, but that’s just my impatience speaking. Finally the first warm night of the year arrived on the eve of May. I opened the window and felt the nighttime air on my skin void of chill for the first time. With the balm comes an early summer symphony. 

on summers eve

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I revel in tracking the minute micro-seasonal shifts and a stretch of time away reveals the speed with which the landscape is changing as spring fleshes out into early summer. The minute shifts stack up into great leaps. 

The mountains
are laughing

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Micro-seasons overlap and in each we find something on its way in, something fully arriving, and something waning. With a single ingredient we can trace three stages and its subtle shift in flavor as it comes into, passes through, and goes out of season.

Tender and Potent

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Takashi walked in with a handful of fuki, the hollow stems of the native Japanese coltsfoot plant, in his hand. This is the first time I’ve ever bought fuki, he said. Only a hundred yen. The first time because fuki are a thing to gather, not purchase.

Stepping into
summer

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Our sansho tree leafs out just as the cherry trees bloom, at the exact season when snapper is at its most delicious. It’s a perfect trifecta for temarizushi, a tender leaf of kinome sandwiched between a translucent slice of sea bream and rice.

Season of abundance

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