“I’ve started showing up late,” Kawashima told me. “At around three, to give my brother some breathing room. He’s learning the ropes, and the only way you do that is by yourself.” Kawashima’s elder son has also decided to become a tofu maker, after a brief stint at Gateway Computers. “I didn’t oblige him,” Kawashima says. “I told him, on the contrary, to get away from home, the way I did. In my late teens, I left Karatsu for Fukuoka”—the nearest large city—“and worked at another tofu place, to see how they did things.
“I studied chabana, flower arranging, and learned to make tea—my business for ten years. When I came home, I wanted to create something new with tofu.” A sudden loud clatter made me start: Kawashima had just pulled down a steel trapdoor in the ceiling, and he shooed me up the ladder. Under the eaves, he has built a tearoom for himself.
In the next two hours, making the rounds with Kawashima, I got to see quite a bit of his enterprise and its fruits. Having asked me if I liked dogs, he took me to his beach house—a Hamptons-style bungalow in an upscale enclave near the castle—where we played with his St. Bernard. Then we drove ten miles out of town, through strawberry fields, and up into the hills, where Kawashima owns several acres. We fed the fat koi in his pond, and tramped through the woods to admire his Shinto shrine, an altar guarded by two gaping stone dogs, one of which catches evil intentions, while the other spits out good luck. I helped him open the elaborately engineered stone sluices that irrigate his kitchen garden, where he stopped to do a little puttering. His wife doesn’t like the country, he confided, so this is his bachelor kingdom, and he bought it with his “pocket money,” because she also wouldn’t like him spending the profits of their business on it. All his crops—tomatoes, melons, eggplants, cherries, a few beans (for edamame), and some white lettuce—are organically grown, as is the rice that he is seeding, experimentally, in a blanket of cotton, to keep down the weeds.
Though I normally don’t start drinking at ten in the morning, I had the excuse that it was nine in the evening (of the night before) by my body clock, and Kawashima is a persuasive host. “I think I was born to make people happy,” he said. So, having tasted some of his homemade plum wine, we sat at the kitchen table of his farmhouse, chasing our aperitif with a bottle of excellent Chapelle-Chambertin ’96, while Kawashima reminisced, as oenophiles do, about the great vintages he has owned and drunk—an ’81 Pétrus, some venerable Lafites—and what he ate with them. His memory stirred, he ducked into a walk-in wine cellar the size of a bank vault, and came back, looking very pleased, with a Château d’ Yquem ’21. I wrestled with my conscience before urging him, with feigned conviction, not to open it.
The farmhouse is built in the traditional style, with shoji windows and a tiled roof curling up at the edges, though its amenities are from a glossy shelter magazine. It sits on a rise overlooking a valley of terraced rice paddies that were simmering under an opaque sky and waiting for the spring rains—a timeless scene only somewhat spoiled by a fretwork of electric pylons. A little farther up the slope, Kawashima has added a luxurious bath pavilion that, like his kitchen, is a sybaritic gadgeteer’s paradise. (The plumbing responds to voice commands.) The tub is in a sort of turret penthouse with glass walls which faces a deep forest furrowed by ravines and inhabited by wild boar and monkeys. When Kawashima is soaking there, he says, he sometimes sees a constellation of impudent simian eyes staring at him through the glass.
I doubted that zaru dofu, or any other sort of tofu, not even shima dofu, would have enough character to hold its own with a great Burgundy like the one we were drinking. But wine and bean curd, Kawashima’s twin passions, are more compatible than you might think. To prove the point, he served us a little amuse-gueule that he devised for wine-tastings: a wedge of dense and pungent saffron-colored miso zuke dofu, which is a block of momengoshi steeped in fermented miso, wrapped in konbu (a form of kelp with a thick, ridged leaf which, in its dried form, resembles a slice of rubber tire tread), and aged for months. At last, some tofu with bite: an alarming, even macho one, like that of a Roquefort at the limit of ripeness.
If you don’t speak Japanese, traveling alone in provincial Japan is not for the timid: the lingua franca is pantomime. I mastered the greetings, which change according to the time of day; a few adjectives (though I got into trouble with oishii—delicious—which may have a lewd connotation in the wrong context); and I learned to count. So finding the Yoyokaku had been a stroke of luck. The motherly proprietress, Harumi Okochi, whose husband’s family have been innkeepers in Karatsu for more than a century, is a former English teacher with a nuanced command of the language and of the local society and folklore. Her library overlooks a rock garden and a waterfall, and after I had bathed in the ryokan’s communal tub and wrapped myself in a blue-and-white yukata, she poured me some tea and we sat reading poetry—paeans to tofu. She asked me if I knew the Manyoshu (“Assembly of Ten Thousand Leaves”), an anthology of literary treasures collected in the eighth century. “Some of its earliest verse,” she said, “was written on Kashiwajima, an island you can see from the tower of the castle, and the fishermen there may have been among the first Japanese to make bean curd. According to legend, their tofu was so hard that it could break stones. That is what they still call it: ishiwari—stone-breaking—dofu. Though I have lived here all my life, I have never tasted it.”
Kashiwajima is a worn, whale-shaped lump of volcanic rock boiling with greenery. Its love poets were the soldiers of a lonely garrison, watching the sea for Korean war galleys, thirteen hundred years ago, and pining for their wives. One afternoon, I hired a launch from a pier near the castle. It bounced across the swell while I clung to the guardrail with white knuckles. Mrs. Okochi, who had changed from a kimono into a pair of cotton trousers, sat primly unperturbed in the cabin, watching for flying fish, and holding a beautifully wrapped box of sweets from the inn, which she’d thought to bring as a gift for the chief tofu maker, Hiromi Takahira, who had agreed to reopen her workshop for us at an ungodly hour: 3 P.M. The little marina was deserted, though from somewhere nearby we heard the sounds of karaoke. There wasn’t a teahouse or a store in sight, so we meandered around the waterfront until we found the workshop, in a corrugated shed on one of the piers. Pampas grass, wild hollyhocks, and thistle were growing by the front door, and the place, like the island generally, had a melancholy air. Kashiwajima has always been dependent on the sea, but in recent times it has lost many of its young people to jobs on the mainland. The elders who remain, however, are a hardy lot. An uni fisherman with white hair and a deep tan, who squatted in a doorway on sinewy haunches while mending his nets, was looking for a wife, he told Mrs. Okochi, eyeing her hopefully. “You should meet my sister,” he added, waving down an elderly cyclist laden with buoys and baskets—Kashiwajima’s last female abalone diver. She was pedaling home in a ratty wetsuit and a faded bonnet, toothless and cheerful, though also a little embarrassed, she told Mrs. Okochi, to be seen with such a puffy face. That, she explained, is what happens when you plug your ears and hold your breath long enough to catch a snap-jawed mollusk clinging to a reef thirty feet down.
At the workshop, Mrs. Takahira, a seventy-one-year-old fisherman’s widow with a round face and a radiant complexion (tofu and hard labor are her beauty secrets, she said) welcomed us with a deep bow. The windows of the shed were open, and the sea breeze carried a scent of rain, wildflowers, and algae. Before her marriage, she told us, she worked on her parents’ farm, growing soybeans, and then she became a nurse in Karatsu. After her husband died and her two sons left home, they told her to stop making tofu for herself—it was too much trouble. But about five years ago she decided that the island should exert “more of an effort to show the world that we exist,” she said. “In the olden days, we were known for our ishiwari dofu. People made it for funerals and weddings, and it was eaten in a fish broth. Now they’re too busy. I started thinking that maybe it could be revived. A few friends said they would help, and the Karatsu town council gave
us some marketing advice. There are sixteen of us, and we take shifts.”
Stone-breaking tofu got its name, according to Mrs. Takahira, because one day an islander walking home dropped her basket and spilled her tofu. “It didn’t crumble, but the stone it fell on did,” she said. “You can believe that or not, but it’s very concentrated. We use five times as many soybeans for the same amount of tofu as other makers do, and organic Japanese daizu is three times as expensive as American beans, so we don’t make much profit. They passed a law saying you can’t use the local ocean water as a nigari anymore—because of the pollution—so we buy evaporated natural sea salt from ¯
O-shima, and that’s what makes it so hard. But too much salt turns your tofu bitter, and if you overcook it, it stinks.”
The only concession Mrs. Takahira makes to convenience, or age, is to pulverize the soybeans in an electric grinder. Otherwise, her tofu-making is powered entirely by muscle. She presses the okara with wooden rolling pins, then squeezes it like an Old World washerwoman wringing linen sheets. Each of the molds is compressed for forty minutes with a twenty-pound weight that she slings about with one hand as if it were a can of tuna fish. When she turns out the bricks of bean curd, their surface is crackled, like parched desert clay. Their texture is a bit grainy, and they offer some faint resistance to a knife. They are thoroughly oishii, though, with an intense soy flavor and the definitive, though unplaceable, sweetness that artisanal tofu seems to share, and which, like the scent of lotus blossoms in a folktale, signals the presence of an unseen divinity.
2005
“The little sad faces next to some items mean they don't taste very good.”
THE POUR
“It’s a naïve domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.”
“Are you the gentleman who thinks he ate his check?”
DRY MARTINI
ROGER ANGELL
The martini is in, the martini is back—or so young friends assure me. At Angelo and Maxie’s, on Park Avenue South, a thirtyish man with backswept Gordon Gekko hair lowers his cell as the bartender comes by and says, “Eddie, gimme a Bombay Sapphire, up.” At Patroon, a possibly married couple want two dirty Tanquerays—gin martinis straight up, with the bits and leavings of a bottle of olives stirred in. At Nobu, a date begins with a saketini—a sake martini with (avert your eyes) a sliver of cucumber on top. At Lotus, at the Merc Bar, and all over town, extremely thin young women hold their stemmed cocktail glasses at a little distance from their chests and avidly watch the shining oil twisted out of a strip of lemon peel spread across the pale surface of their gin or vodka martini like a gas stain from an idling outboard. They are thinking Myrna Loy, they are thinking Nora Charles and Ava Gardner, and they are keeping their secret, which is that it was the chic shape of the glass—the slim narcissus stalk rising to a 1939 World’s Fair triangle above—that drew them to this drink. Before their first martini ever, they saw themselves here with an icy mart in one hand, sitting on a bar stool, one leg crossed over the other, in a bar small enough so that a cigarette can be legally held in the other hand, and a curl of smoke rising above the murmurous conversation and the laughter. Heaven. The drink itself was a bit of a problem—that stark medicinal bite—but mercifully you can get a little help for that now with a splash of scarlet cranberry juice thrown in, or with a pink-grapefruit-cassis martini, or a green-apple martini, or a flat-out chocolate martini, which makes you feel like a grown-up twelve years old. All they are worried about—the tiniest dash of anxiety—is that this prettily tinted drink might allow someone to look at them and see Martha Stewart. Or that they’re drinking a variation on the cosmopolitan, that Sarah Jessica Parker–Sex and the City craze that is so not in anymore.
Not to worry. In time, I think, these young topers will find their way back to the martini, to the delectable real thing, and become more fashionable than they ever imagined. In the summer of 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Hyde Park—it was a few weeks before the Second World War began—and as twilight fell FDR said, “My mother does not approve of cocktails and thinks you should have a cup of tea.” The king said, “Neither does my mother.” Then they had a couple of rounds of martinis.
I myself might have had a martini that same evening, at my mother and stepfather’s house in Maine, though at eighteen—almost nineteen—I was still young enough to prefer something sweeter, like the yummy, Cointreau-laced sidecar. The martini meant more, I knew that much, and soon thereafter, at college, I could order one or mix one with aplomb. As Ogden Nash put it, in “A Drink with Something in It”:
There is something about a Martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about a Martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth—
I think that perhaps it’s the gin.
In John O’Hara’s 1934 novel, Appointment in Samarra, the doomed hero, Julian English, and his wife, Caroline, observe Christmas with his parents, as usual. They live in the Pennsylvania coal town of Gibbsville, but the Englishes are quality, and before their festive dinner Julian’s father, Dr. William English, mixes and serves up midday martinis; then they have seconds.
In the 1940 classic movie comedy The Philadelphia Story, the reliable character actor John Halliday plays Katharine Hepburn’s reprobate father, who has returned home unexpectedly on the eve of her wedding. Standing on a terrace in the early evening, he mixes and pours a dry martini for himself and his deceived but accepting wife (Mary Nash) while, at the same time, he quietly demolishes his daughter’s scorn for him and some of her abiding hauteur. It’s the central scene of the ravishing flick, since it begins Tracy Lord’s turnabout from chilly prig Main Line heiress to passably human Main Line heiress, and the martini is the telling ritual: the presentation of sophistication’s Host. Hepburn had played the same part in the Broadway version of the Philip Barry play, a year before, which also required that martini to be mixed and poured before our eyes. Sitting in the dark at both versions, I was entranced by the dialogue—only Philip Barry could have a seducer-dad convincingly instruct his daughter in morals—but at the same time made certain that the martini was made right: a slosh of gin, a little vermouth, and a gentle stirring in the pitcher before the pouring and the first sips. Yes, okay, my martini-unconscious murmured, but next time maybe a little more ice, Seth.
This is not a joke. Barry’s stage business with the bottles and the silver stirring spoon in one moment does away with a tiresome block of explanation about the Lords: he’s run off with a nightclub singer and she’s been betrayed, but they have shared an evening martini together before this—for all their marriage, in fact—and soon they’ll be feeling much better. In the movie, which was directed by George Cukor, the afternoon loses its light as the drink is made and the talk sustained, and the whole tone of the drama shifts. Everyone is dressed for the coming party, and the martini begins the renewing complications. Sitting in the theater, we’re lit up a little, too, and ready for all that comes next—the dance, the scene by the pool—because the playwright has begun things right.
Cocktails at Hyde Park or on Philadelphia’s Main Line sound aristocratic, but the Second World War changed our ways. In the Pacific, where I was stationed, a couple of Navy fighter pilots told me a dumb story they’d heard in training, about the tiny survival kit that was handed out to flight-school graduates headed for carrier duty. OPEN ONLY IN EXTREME EMERGENCY, it said—which seemed to be the case of a pilot north of Midway whose Grumman quit cold a hundred miles away from his flattop. After ditching, he climbed into his inflatable raft, regarded the empty horizon that encircled him, and opened the kit. Inside was a tiny shaker and a glass, a stirring straw, a thimbleful of gin, and an eyedropper’s worth of vermouth. He mixe
d and stirred, and was raising the mini cocktail to his lips when he became aware that vessels had appeared from every quarter of the Pacific and were making toward him at top speed. The first to arrive, a torpedo boat, roared up, and its commanding officer, shouting through his megaphone, called, “That’s not the right way to make a dry martini!”
Dryness was all, dryness was the main debate, and through the peacetime 1940s and ’50s we new suburbanites tilted the Noilly Prat bottle with increasing parsimony, as the martini recipe went up from three parts gin and one part dry vermouth to four and five to one, halted briefly at six to one, and rose again from there. George Plimpton recently reminded me about the Montgomery—a fifteen-to-one martini named after the British field marshal, who was said never to go into battle with less than these odds in his favor. What was happening, of course, was an improvement in the quality of everyday gin. The Frankenstein’s-laboratory taste of Prohibition gin no longer needed a sweetener to hide its awfulness: just a few drops of Tribuno or Martini & Rossi Extra Dry would suffice to soften the ginny juniper bite.
Preciousness almost engulfed us, back then. Tiffany’s produced a tiny silver oil can, meant to dispense vermouth. Serious debates were mounted about the cool, urban superiority of the Gibson—a martini with an onion in it—or the classicism of the traditional olive. Travelers came home from London or Paris with funny stories about the ghastly martinis they’d been given in the Garrick Club or at the Hotel Regina bar. And, in a stuffy little volume called The Hour, the historian and Harper’s columnist Bernard De Voto wrote, “You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth and one of the shortest.”
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