Fresh Made Daily

Coming soon to Sunbury (hopefully)

Meanwhile - some interesting reading

For years I⁽¹⁾ have been involved in a love affair with the cooking of Japan, one that grows more intense with each of my stays in that enchanted land. This may sound strange to those other Westeners who still labor under long standing misconceptions that make this distinguished cooking seem utterly and impossibly alien. Before I encountered it personally and, though my Japanese wife became a member of the family, I too shared the misimpression that traditional Japanese cooking is simply many little dishes with an overdose of fish - that it is mainly an esthetic production in which palatability is sacrificed in favor of beautiful effects and finicky etiquette.

Japanese food is indeed served in small, meticulously prepared portions - but if the portions served at any one meal are less that most Westerners are accustomed to, there are enough of them to approach an average Western meal in total volume. I also grant that fish plays a featured role in Japanese cooking. But while fish, shellfish and seaweed appear frequently on the menu, they never become monotonous because the Japanese have devised an astonishing number of mouth-watering ways of preparing them.

As for the emphasis on appearance, it is certainly true that the Japanese are adept at imparting additional excitement to food through the use of exquisite dishes and bowls selected for their harmony with particular foods. This dedication to visual appeal actually enhances a meal. For, as your palate is captivated by tastes calculated to set off each other, your eye is intrigued by contrasts of color, shapes and texture.

As a journalist, I have friends in the profession whose work has taken them to other countries famous for fine cuisine. When at last they sampled Japanese cooking and compared it with the food they had enjoyed elsewhere, these world travelers invariably characterized Japanese cuisine as uniquely refined, fastidious and subtle; the Japanese themselves refer to it as sappari - clean, neat, light, sparkling with honesty. Gourmets have ranked the cooking of Japan with that of France and China as one of the world's truly great cuisines. In Japan grande cuisine is every bit as grande as it is in France; and if Japanese cooking has a relatively limited range of foodstufs to work with, it compensates for this lack through great versatility in methods.

A reflection of Japanese sensitivity toward food is the great attention paid to each material being processed - even more consideration than is shown by the French, which is very much indeed. Whereas the French and the Chinese tend to meld together many ingredients in one dish, the Japanese generally strive to preserve the intrinsic properties of each so that all may have about equal importance in taste as well as in appearance. In clear Japanese soup, for example, that bit of carrot used as garnish is quite distinct in taste, color, and shape from the pale-gold sliver of pungent lemon that flows up against your lips as you drink the soup. Each ingredient in the soup is to be relished seperately, for its own special character. Moreover, if a dish calls for a strong-tasting garnish such as chopped scallions or grated ginger, this is added only at the last moment - usually by the diner himself - so that its taste will not permeate the other ingredients. Many Japanese get most of their high-quality protein from dried fish and shrimp. But ...

Of all the (Marine) miracles to which the Japanese can guide us, none so insults our prejudices and offers so much for the future as the murky world of undersea vegetables. (Again) our English vocabulary leads us astray, and I do not know which word is worse: �seaweed,� with its explicit meaning of uselessness and its dank evocatin of sunken ships and drowned sailors, or �algae,� the correct scientific term, which suggests to most Americans the green scum on stagnant ponds.

When you think about it, of course, there is no reason why kelp or laver should be considered less appetizing than asparagus - in fact they are delicious - but the prejudice remains. Many Westerners in Japan go queasy at the thought of seaweed but happily gobble up crisp sheets of pressed nori (laver) without a moment's hesitation.

In Japanese, the words for most seaweeds are as commonplace and respevtable as �cabbage,� and the six kinds of algae that the Japanese use account for about 10 per cent of their total food intake. Most of these sea vegetables are found wild in the ocean, but nori is painstakingly cultivated in shelted inlets along the coast. Tokyo Bay itself produces excellent nori.

All of these products are rich sources of minerals and vitamins, all easily and quickly digestable. The basic health of the Japanese people, despite their low consumption of foods like milk and meat and eggs that we consider essential, is generally credited to the seaweed as wellas the fish in their diet.

Most delightful of all, the seaweeds, especially nori, open up a whole new world (new for us, that is) of seasoning possibilities that have been fully exploited by the Japanese for centuries.

Nori, particularly rich in vitamins A, B12 and D, is pressed into paper-thin sheets and sun-dried on a smooth surface. Toasted to crispness and rolled neatly around rice and other ingredients, these purplish-black sheets make one standard kind of sushi.

For years, population experts have been predicting that as man spreads over more and more of the earth's surface and exhausts its resources he will have to farm the sea extensively for sustenance. We need only to taste the seemingly infinite delights that Japan extracts from the animals and vegetables of the sea to discover how exciting this otherwise dismal future could be. Doctors assure us that such an ocean diet would be good for us as well.

Japanese suffer fewer heart attacks and have far less cholesterol residing in their veins than Americans; comparative studies on Japanese-Americans have shown that this is not a racial quirk. It is a direct result of diet, of the fact that the Japanese people still take most of their protein from the animal and vegetable dwellers in the blue sea plain.