There is some truth to this. A lot of things do get simmered in soy and sugar in Japanese kitchens, with perhaps some dashi (the Japanese ‘stock’ made with an infusion or konbu and, typically, katsuobushi, with dried shiitake mushrooms) or ginger or garlic, or mirin – sweet cooking sake – as a sugar substitute. When I have been in Japan for more than a couple of weeks, I do sometimes yearn for a splash of lemon juice or vinegar to cut through the sugary umami flavours, but soy sauce and sugar provide such a potent combination of sweetness and amino acids that, for most of the time, they are hard to resist.
The apogee of the soy–sugar genre is tsukudani but, far from being monotonous, properly made tsukudani is, I think, one of the minor yet-to-be-discovereds of Japanese cuisine. It is made with a variety of ingredients, from the konbu left over after making dashi, to clams, to tiny squid, all of which are simmered, separately, in soy sauce and sugar to make different types of tsukudani. With a rich, fermented, almost beefy base note from the soy sauce and that addictive sweetness from the sugar, tsukudani is great for giving heft to rice or salads, to nibble alongside a bento box, or just with sake.
The sweet–savoury aspect of tsukudani is particularly intriguing to me. Ferran Adrià’s brother Albert was probably the first modern-era European chef to push the boundaries of sweet and savoury with his desserts featuring olive oil, beetroot and bay leaf, all of which were considered quite radical back in the 1990s (macaron master Pierre Hermé should also get an honourable mention here, although his ketchup macarons have not stood the test of time). But Japanese cooking has long mixed sweet and savoury in this way – sugar is added to simmered vegetables, or the simmered beef dish sukiyaki, for instance, and it is in many of the tares, the sauces used to baste grilled foods. Often during a traditional kaiseki meal you will get something sweet early on when you might otherwise assume everything would be salty, or a course that mixes sweet with savoury (at a contemporary soba restaurant near Harajuku I recently had a great combination of prawns with persimmon as a starter, for instance). Tsukudani does something similar, it is simultaneously sweet and savoury.
It is possible to pinpoint the exact geographical location where tsukudani originated. The name of the place helps: Tsukuda-jima, a man-made island in Tokyo Bay. Tsukudani is still made here in three ancient shops not far from the lively street of okonomiyaki (a western Japan dish often described as a thick, savoury pancake, although it’s so much more than that) and monjayaki (a sloppier, Tokyo version of okonomiyaki) restaurants for which the island is better known. The tsukudani district still feels like the fishing village it once was. I am told there are families who have lived here for generations and they tend to hold on to their homes and pass them down. Perhaps this is why it hasn’t yet been swamped by high-rise apartment buildings, despite being within sight of the tower blocks of Ginza. Washing still hangs from the balconies, and there are little grocer shops and shrines dotted along the canals. The morning I had visited, a year prior to my family’s trip to Japan, a shopkeeper was hosing down the pavement outside his door and kids played in the street, a rare sight in central Tokyo. At the point where I reached the wall which keeps this patch of reclaimed land safe from the Sumida River beyond, the air was rich and heavy with the smell of sweetened soy sauce. The island’s three tsukudani shops are all on the street here by the river wall and one of them, Tsukugen Tanakaya, a seventh-generation business dating back to 1848, had agreed to let me visit.
The women who serve in the shop sent me round to the back of the building where, in a dark cave of a kitchen, I found Tsutomu Ebihara dressed in white waterproof dungarees and hunched over a large vat of bubbling black liquid on his stove.
‘This was once an island of fishermen,’ Tsutomu told me when I asked about tsukudani’s origins. ‘They used to stew the fish to preserve it, then, as preservation became less important, they began to concentrate on the flavour.’
These weren’t just any old fishermen, though: they had been commanded to move from their original home in Tsukuda Mura in Osaka to the new capital, Edo, by Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japan’s seventeenth-century shogun. Some say that one of the fishermen had saved the shogun’s life, others that they were simply the best fishermen in Japan and they were needed to keep the fast-growing city of Edo supplied with seafood. They settled on this island in the bay just a couple of miles from Edo Castle, and were granted special fishing privileges.
‘The smaller fish they couldn’t sell, they would boil in sea water to preserve them,’ Tsutomu said. Later, by stewing meat, fish, vegetables or even insects in soy sauce, they could not only preserve them but make them tasty and, with the advent of cheap sugar from home-grown sugar cane, that too went into the pot. The fishermen also realised that you could even reuse ingredients this way, like the konbu which had been simmered once to make dashi, which could then be turned into a tasty condiment for rice.
Today Tsukugen Tanakaya sells twenty different types of tsukudani, including my favourite which is made from tiny clams. When I visited, Tsutomu was busy making their best-seller, konbu, which is also the trickiest to get right (it burns easily, apparently).
‘You boil konbu for three to four hours, cut it into bite-sized pieces, then simmer in soy sauce and sugar for an hour and a half,’ he explained. It is hardly a complex process, and the soy sauce doesn’t even need to be anything special – I noticed he was using catering-sized cans of Kikkoman – but there is a huge difference between cheap tsukudani and the good stuff: the latter will have a rounded flavour and still taste of the original ingredient rather than just sweetened soy sauce. A cheap one will taste like something burnt, with added salt.
Tsutomu’s favourite was goby fish, a bottom feeder, in truth rather a smelly creature which usually tastes to me of soil. It changes into something deliciously savoury when simmered as tsukudani, but not delicious enough, apparently. As with so many traditional Japanese foods, tsukudani is in decline. ‘It’s not something you make at home because, well, the smell. And the people who eat it are dying off’ was Tsutomu’s bleak diagnosis. ‘People eat more bread, more than rice these days, I’m sad about it of course but I can’t really do anything about it.’ There used to be half a dozen tsukudani shops on the island, back when a little mound of tsukudani was a regular feature of every schoolchild’s bento box, but as consumption of rice has dropped, so has its accompanying condiment. ‘Some younger sake drinkers are rediscovering it. Maybe one day all Japanese people will come back to it,’ Tsutomu said unconvincingly.
Tsutomu had been rather wary at the beginning of our meeting but eventually he felt at ease enough to reveal the secret of great tsukudani: the tare, or basic sauce, which he said had its origins back when the company was founded in 1843. Every day, he said, he put the leftover sauce to one side and then, the next morning he would use it as the base for the next batch of tsukudani. This 170-year-old, continuous ‘mother’ sauce was the secret of the special Tsukugen Tanakaya flavour.
In Japan tare – pronounced ‘tah-ray’ – is ubiquitous. Or, rather, ‘they’ are ubiquitous, as tare ingredients and their ratios vary. Tare is basically a multi-purpose, savoury-sweet, dark brown sauce. As well as providing the base for tsukudani, it is used in numerous other dishes. Tare is, essentially, soy sauce sweetened with mirin or sugar, sometimes augmented with garlic or ginger, sometimes reduced or thickened. It can be brushed over yakitori or unagi (freshwater eel) prior to grilling. You see types of tare thinned for use as a dipping sauce for sukiyaki or shabu-shabu, or as a translucent glaze (‘nikiri’) brushed on nigiri by sushi chefs. Confusingly, tare is also the word given to the super-intense flavour base of ramen soup – another potent, brown, soy-based liquid usually added to the bowl before the broth (though, sometimes it comes after), kind of like its essence, or as some ramen chefs I have spoken to like to claim, ‘its soul’. It is also a close relative of the super-addictive, thickened Terikayi-style sauces which are slathered on tako yaki (savoury octopus doughnuts), and okonomiyaki. Those ta
re can have everything from fruits (apples, tomatoes) to sesame oil, herbs or spices added; basically, you could brush okonomiyaki sauce on the seat from an old railway carriage and it would taste great.
As I walked back to the Metro station that day on Tsukuda island my thoughts kept returning to the tare. Could Tsutomu’s sauce really have had its origins in the mid-nineteenth century, before the internal combustion engine, before the electric light bulb, before the telephone? I had long been fascinated by this practice, widespread among Japanese chefs, of using a tare during the day, putting the leftover sauce in the fridge, and then simply topping that up the next morning and continuing – as if this absolutely did not constitute any kind of health hazard – for many years. I had eaten at yakitori joints where they had been doing this with the same tare for decades. Sometimes, when a new apprentice leaves a master yakitori chef to start up on their own, the master will donate some of his own tare as a kind of ‘starter’, much as a baker might with a sourdough starter. Once, I visited a small, hole-in-the-wall yakitori place which claimed their tare was over sixty years old. I had heard of another which claimed theirs could be traced back through continual usage to before World War II, and now this one, at Tsutomu’s Tsukudani kitchen, which supposedly went all the way back to the mid-nineteenth century.
This set me thinking about what the oldest continuously used tare in Japan might be. And thus my quest was born, a quest which eventually took me on another detour while we were visiting Kyushu on this latest trip. As with the nature of much that I do, this ‘quest’ was not especially focused, nor indeed all that taxing. It was more an excuse, in this case to eat some great unagi at a restaurant which by chance lay en route from Arita to our next overnight stop in Yamaguchi. It was here that I believed I had tracked down a tare whose longevity could beat all the others, even Tsutomu’s, by quite a few years …
I can smell my quest’s end, the oldest tare in Japan, before I have even entered the doors of Motoyoshiya, a three centuries old unagi restaurant in Yanagawa, in Saga Prefecture, northern Kyushu. Beside the quaint thatched entrance to the restaurant is a massive industrial air vent blackened with a thick layer of eel grease. It is sucking cooking fumes from the kitchen and expelling them straight out onto the street and is a far more effective promotional tool than any sandwich board, neon light, or ten foot sign could ever be. Asger and I stand there a while, hungry after our Arita pottery tour, savouring the meaty aromas of grilled eel and what is presumably that ancient sauce. Dear God, it smells good. You can almost eat the air.
Asger hastens through the door and I follow him. We are met by the restaurant manager, Ken Ichiyasu, husband of the daughter of the Motoyoshiya family which has owned the restaurant since it opened over 335 years ago.
‘We serve exactly the same dish that they did when they opened in 1681,’ beams Ichiyasu, a jovial, chubby fellow dressed head to toe in Champion sportswear. The dish is unagi no seiromushi, grilled freshwater eel on rice with shredded omelette – the omelette being a special addition of the region. The rice itself is covered in the magical tare and steamed in a wooden box, known as a ‘seiro’. Meanwhile, eel fillets are grilled over charcoal and intermittently dipped in the sauce (a technique called ‘kabayaki’), before being placed on top of the rice with the shredded omelette scattered down the middle. The whole box gets one final steaming prior to being served in a gorgeous lacquered box.
Before we get to taste it, we must pay homage to the tare. Through the kitchens Ichiyasu leads us to a separate alcove where a chef is busy tending to white-hot coals and flayed eels.
‘This is the most important treasure of this restaurant,’ says Ichiyasu, pointing to a very large ceramic mixing bowl brimming with a glossy black sauce. I place my nose inches from its brooding, mirror-still surface and breathe deeply of its fishy-caramel aroma. ‘Nobody can copy this tare or make it at home. We have been making it, without stop, for over three centuries.’
Wrestling with an almost overpowering urge just to lap directly from this mythical liquid like some ravenous wolf, I am nevertheless aware that I have to present Ken with some awkward scientific truths about his tare. I tell him about the analysis that was carried out by a Japanese TV show a year ago, which proved that every single molecule of a tare used in this continuous manner will in fact be entirely replaced within a few weeks’ use.
To my surprise, Ken agrees: ‘Oh, no, no, we also don’t believe there is 330 years of flavour in this. Of course not. But there is a secret ingredient.’
The two main ingredients of Motoyoshiya’s tare are simply soy sauce and sugar syrup, but after a little more gentle probing the ‘mystery’ third ingredient turns out not to be so secret after all.
‘The secret ingredient of the sauce is the eels that are dipped in it!’ says Ken. ‘The more eels are dipped in it, the better. This is where the flavour is. So, you can imagine, it tastes really good at our busiest time in July and August. We can serve up to three hundred eels a day then. But,’ he adds, suddenly serious, ‘the method for making the tare is secret.’ (I’m guessing ‘gentle heating’.)
As Ken says, summer is the traditional eel-eating season in Japan, the, to me always rather odd, logic being that hot, oily, grilled eel dipped in a sweet brown sauce and served on a large mound of cooked rice somehow ‘cools’ you and ‘gives you energy’ to combat the muggy heat of a Japanese summer. The truth is, as Ken admits, eel actually taste better in winter because they take on more fat to insulate them against the cold. He also claims that Kyushu unagi, in particular those from around Yanagawa City which is criss-crossed by canals and lies close to Ariake Bay, are the best in the world.
Yanagawa was once a prime habitat for eels, in particular ‘hoshi-ao’, a type of white-spotted eel found in this zone between the rivers and the sea, but today there are very few of any kinds of Japanese wild eels left (proper name Anguilla japonica). The population has declined by 90 per cent over the last thirty years and the unagi have belatedly been placed on the government’s ‘Red List’ of endangered fish. (It’s a similar story in Europe, where the eel population has decreased by over 80 per cent since the sixties, dropping off especially dramatically in the eighties to the extent that the eel is now also officially an endangered species there.)
Just as we are getting to know the freshwater eel, it is disappearing. Until the early twentieth century when research began to throw light on this strange creature’s life cycle, the reproductive cycle of the eel was a dark mystery which had piqued the interest of some of the greatest minds in history. No one had the faintest idea where they came from or how they reproduced. Aristotle believed they were a type of earthworm; Freud spent ages studying their genitals. Today, it is understood that half of the world’s population of eels spawn in the Sargasso Sea, while the other half spawn in the Western Mariana Trench area, Japanese eels coming from the latter. They wriggle their way thousands of miles across the oceans to freshwater rivers and lakes, where they can live for ten to fourteen years.
Japan consumes around three-quarters of the total global eel catch; these days most eels consumed in Japan are imported from farms in China. Wild Japanese eels are increasingly rare and expensive; their scarcity has forced prices up as much as tenfold in recent years, leading to the closure of several venerable eel restaurants across Japan.
‘It is a big, big problem,’ says Ken of the Japanese unagi’s decline. ‘There are two reasons: climate change, and because their habitat has been taken by industrial farming.’ The global eel population has also been struck by a devastating parasite while other manmade obstacles, like weirs and locks on rivers, block their migration.
These days, all of Motoyoshiya’s eels are farmed on Kyushu, down south in Miyazaki and Kagoshima Prefectures. Farming produces fatter eels with smaller bones and a more consistent flavour, and they also don’t smell quite so much during cooking. But merely breeding baby eels, or ‘glass eels’, which have been caught in the wild is no solution to the impending extinctio
n of the species. For that, someone needs to find a way to actually breed them in captivity sustainably. Until then, researchers at Kinki University have recently developed faux-unagi, using catfish fed a special diet to make them more oily and counter their characteristic soil flavour. Their eel-ish catfish had recently gone on sale, pre-grilled, in limited quantities.
‘We would never use that,’ says Ken. ‘But I think someone, one day, will figure out a way to breed unagi in captivity. It will happen, but it will be very expensive, I’m sure.’
Back to the tare. What if I offered him fifty million yen for the entire bowl? He laughs, and shakes his head. Fifty billion? Nope. The sauce is the source of the restaurant’s repute and wealth. What about the hygiene issues of an everlasting tare? In the West, the restaurant would likely be closed down for all sorts of health and safety violations. ‘We warm it through every day and the whole box of rice and eel is steamed, so that is not an issue.’
I stand and watch the chef tending to a dozen or so eel fillets in his smoke-and-tare-encrusted cocoon. Every surface of the alcove is coated with a thin layer of brown gunk. He dips one fresh-grilled fillet, now glistening with fat, into the tare then places it back on the grill. A few drops of that precious sauce drip down onto the hot coals and catch light, turning the air deliciously smoky. My mouth is a waterfall. Time to eat.
In one of the restaurant’s private dining rooms, kneeling on the tatami mat before a low table, Asger and I are each served our own red lacquer boxes of rice topped with two fillets of tare-encrusted eel. The eel are the colour of creosote, their tare coating shimmers in the light. They taste of fish fat and sugar, soy sauce and, yes, I do believe, in their depth and richness, I can also detect an echo of centuries past, of the residue of a million eels. I just hope there are a million more to come.
The Meaning of Rice Page 10