The Meaning of Rice
Page 24
Ikegawa claims that he can remember every single skewer he has ever served and to whom he served it. I wonder about all the conversations he must have overheard and memory-banked. He mimes tucking a secret away in his breast pocket: ‘I am all ears but I put confidential information in my pocket.’
Though he often had sharp words for his young yakitori padawan, Inomata was a relatively kindly teacher who taught by example. ‘Often in traditional Japanese restaurants the boss can be very tough, emotional, angry, but he was very logical, and he worked the hardest of us all so everyone followed.’ But it was four years – four years – of ‘oimawashi’ work, being the ‘dogsbody’, before Ikegawa was allowed to actually place a skewer of meat over hot coals. During those years, he would work in the restaurant from nine in the morning to around midnight, then go home and practise making yakitori himself until the early hours. He studied the history of yakitori which, he says, evolved in Turkey where, of course, they still cook on metal skewers, before moving to Asia where they substituted bamboo for the metal, arriving in Japan during the Muromachi period (1336–1573). The modern-style yakitori joint was established in the post-war era when chicken was the only available meat, and yakitori places were usually yatai, or street carts. ‘It was food for workers, up in Ueno, or Tsukiji. But most of the yatai were cleared away for the 1964 Olympics,’ he tells me.
A good yakitori chef can break a chicken down into over thirty different parts – some of which I never even considered edible, like the trachea or kneecap. Ikegawa is a little more selective and serves around twenty different types of chicken skewer, along with some seasonal vegetables (his Brussels sprouts are unprecedentedly good), tofu and quails eggs, finishing the meal with a rice bowl and minced chicken (there are no desserts). It is a symphony of textures, not all of them immediately appealing to a Western palate: I have still not really reconciled myself to the crunchy-chew of nankotsu – cartilage – for instance. The cuts range from almost raw tenderloin with a dab of fresh-grated wasabi to deeply flavourful thigh meat, as well as innards like liver (the trickiest part to cook), heart, rubbery skin concertined on the stick, and, my favourite, the chouchin. Otherwise known as the ‘lantern’, this is the chicken’s uterus and fallopian tube, removed with the soft, orange ovum still attached before either egg white or shell have formed; there can be as many as twenty of them per chicken. It looks like a little knapsack on a stick, and the ‘eggs’ pop satisfyingly in your mouth.
Of course, good yakitori costs: you can pay as little as a couple of hundred yen per skewer at a hole-in-the-wall yakitori joint. Torishiki is about ¥6,500 yen (£35) for a full meal, but that’s still nothing like the cost of a meal at a top sushiya, which can easily run to four times that.
Ikegawa uses one-hundred-day-old chickens raised close to Koriyama in Fukushima. The breed is called date-dori, a cross between a Japanese chicken and the fabled poulet de Bresse from eastern France. ‘They are really healthy, free-range, they eat when they want, they are really strong. In the winter they taste better because they eat more, so they exercise more, the liver is more rich.’ The liver is the litmus of yakitori: if the liver is sweet with no trace of bitterness then the chicken is likely to have lived a good life. The liver at Torishiki is pillowy soft and tastes like chicken candy.
Ikegawa has recently experimented with other birds like duck, quail and even swallow, and has also given great thought to the type of charcoal he uses (hard-wood binchotan, from Wakayama – which smokes less and burns more slowly); to how the juices which drip from the skewers create smoke when they hit the embers and indirectly flavour the meat; to the salt; and, of course, to the tare, the mahogany-brown sauce into which he dips certain skewers during grilling (others get just salt). Based on my experiences trying to extract recipes for tare from other yakitori chefs, I assumed his was a big secret.
‘No, no secret, it’s just soy sauce, mirin and zarame sugar,fn1 but when I opened the restaurant in 2007 my master gave me some of his tare from his restaurant. It must already have been twenty years old and, over the years, I suppose because I dip so many skewers in it, the meat must give it a special, umami flavour.’
Ikegawa suddenly stops. Sweat glistens on his shaved head and drips down into the rolled hachimaki cloth tied around his brow. He looks me in the eye. ‘Why don’t you come over here and give it a go?’
And with that invitation I circumvent four years’ yakitori apprenticeship and find myself squeezing sideways through the tiny back kitchen, its walls covered with stacks of plates and glasses, to find myself behind the counter of Torishiki.
The view is very different here, in the centre of the horseshoe-shaped counter which, in a short while, will be ringed babbling customers. I can see Ikegawa’s grill in all its meat- and ash-encrusted glory, thick with the smoky, black, sedimentary build-up of a million cooked chicken skewers. It looks like some ancient sarcophagus retrieved from the Valley of the Kings. Beside it is a large, red ceramic pot, vessel of the fabled tare. The dense, dark-brown liquid cascades slowly down its sides like primordial umami-ooze. Ikegawa hands me an apron, a fan and a skewer of thigh meat and gestures, go ahead. I place it on the grill, noting how the smoke is drawn efficiently away under the counter by his super-quiet induction system. Ikegawa gestures to my fan; I waft the embers which glow a diabolical red; smoke rises, hissing as the juices from the meat drip onto them. He gestures again for me to turn the skewer and, moments later, to dip it into the tare and return it to the heat, and so on until it is cooked and I am invited to taste my work: the succulence is astounding, the meat releases a powerful wave of flavour which carries on and on until well after I have gnawed the skewer clean. (As sushi chefs prefer you to eat their nigiri with your hands rather than using chopsticks, Ikegawa advises that you always eat straight from the skewer rather than removing the morsels of meat onto a plate with chopsticks.)
Ikegawa’s evening guests are due. It is time to leave but I have just a couple more questions. I am always curious how the shokunin copes with the monotony of working in one relatively limited field for years on end. After all, most of us seek some variety in our work. I ask if he can ever imagine getting bored cooking chicken over coals. ‘No, not at all. I want to be a specialist for all my life,’ he says. ‘Young people have so many choices these days that they quit too easily. The most important thing is to have a passion right from the start.’
Torishiki has one Michelin star. Is he aiming for more? ‘I don’t know if that’s possible, I’m just doing what I do, as best as I can. For sure, more of that kind of recognition would help to promote yakitori outside of Japan, make people realise it can be as high an art as sushi.’
The next afternoon, Lissen, Asger, Emil and I take the commuter train out to Koiwa where Ikegawa grew up amid a cloud of chicken fat-laden charcoal smoke.
My family is not impressed, and wonder aloud why on earth I have brought them here. It’s true, this is not the most salubrious part of Tokyo: the warren of alleys by the station boast as many Thai massage parlours as restaurants and Ikegawa had himself warned me that most of the decent yakitori places had long gone, but there was one place he still recommended: Toriki. We are guided to its first-floor entrance by a kindly, aproned waitress from another izakaya a little way down Koiwa’s pedestrianised high street. It is early evening and Toriki, a ramshackle room with various simmered vegetable dishes lined up along the bar, tapas-style, the requisite beer posters on the walls and boxes of unopened condiments in the corner, is empty; the chef, an older gentleman in white t-shirt with a lit cigarette dangling permanently from his lower lip, is preparing his mise en place for the evening. It doesn’t look all that promising, but our ‘yakitori sets’ are delicious: five sticks – gizzard, thigh, wing, liver and skin, along with mustard, a slice of lemon, and no chopsticks – for a few hundred yen. It is a long way from this to Torishiki, and the quality was obviously a few steps down, but, then again, in some ways it was not so different. Deliciousness has many forms an
d, in Japan, is found in many places.
Chapter 27
Yanagihara
I have worked in Michelin-starred kitchens in Paris, I have cooked for large numbers of people in small, unfamiliar kitchens and I have made dinner for famous and revered chefs (not to mention my mother-in-law), but I have never been this out of my depth while wearing an apron.
I am attempting to filet an eel but the skin of this long, slithery thing is as tough as plastic hessian and I am making an awful hash of it. The poor creature now looks as if someone has taken a blunt hacksaw to it. My teacher pauses behind me, reaches around my waist and takes my hands in his, like a golf pro showing a newbie a grip. It is an alarmingly intimate action for one man to perform upon another in public – particularly as we have only just met, and he hasn’t even bought me dinner – but I acquiesce and soon there are two, skin-free eel fillets on my chopping board.
My visit to the Yanagihara School of Traditional Japanese Cuisine had begun to go awry before I had even entered its front gate. The school is located in one of the poshest parts of Tokyo, close to the American Embassy in Akasaka. When I arrive, I find myself unable to open the gate to enter the small, meticulously kept front garden in front of this elegant four-storey building, its exterior clad with expensive dark slate tiles. I push and pull, but the damn thing seems to be locked. Eventually I buzz the intercom and ask for help. A moment later, a handsome clean-cut man of a kind one could imagine reading the news on Japanese TV, comes to my rescue.
‘It’s not locked,’ the man smiles sympathetically. ‘See?’ And he slides the gate open to the right.
The man is Naoyuki Yanagihara, the thirty-seven-year-old scion of this three-generations-old cooking school. He guides me into the entrance hall where a dozen women aged from their mid-thirties to early eighties are waiting for his cooking class to start. I put on the standard Japanese indoor plastic slippers and a flowery apron I’ve borrowed from a friend, and follow the group upstairs to the demonstration kitchen.
The air is rich with the aroma of fresh dashi. Three elderly women (the eldest of whom, I later learn, is eighty), each in their own floral pinny, buzz around the kitchen preparing the ingredients for the cooking demonstration which is about to take place. It is a similar set-up to my alma mater, Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, with a large central island with hob and sink, overhead TV screens to show the close-up work and a blackboard behind.
Naoyuki introduces me to his mother, Noriko, who, together with his father, Kazunari, is still very much involved in the day-to-day running of the school – she as executive director in charge of etiquette and table manners, he as president. As we talk, the elder Mr Yanagihara, now seventy-four, dressed in a pale blue lab coat with elasticated cuffs, joins us. He mentions that NHK had recently phoned him to check some food facts for their anime series of my book, and we chat a little about the programme.
I have come to the Yanagihara School for several reasons. I had heard its name mentioned reverentially by various people in the Japanese food world among whom the Yanagihara family is legendary. This is particularly with regard to its dedication to keeping alive the traditions of Kinsa-ryu, the style of cooking which evolved alongside the tea ceremony from the early seventeenth century onwards, first in Kyoto, then in Edo (or Tokyo as it is now known). Yanagihara students are an unusually loyal and dedicated bunch; the oldest (not here today, alas) is ninety-six, another has been attending the school for fifty years. It also has a reputation for being exclusive, costly and popular with ladies of leisure: the equivalent, perhaps, of Leith’s in London, or a traditional Swiss finishing school.
Mrs Yanagihara, a formidable-looking woman in her late sixties with a daunting glossy hairdo and a faultless carapace of make-up, presents me with her business card.
‘I’ve read your book,’ she offers, brusquely.
Now, ‘I’ve read your book’ is a fine thing to say to an author so long as you follow it up with something along the lines of ‘And it was amazing, the single greatest book I have ever read.’ Something like that. But it is the very worst thing you can say to an author if you then just leave the silence hanging, as Mrs Yanagihara does.
I try to compose myself. Conscious that teaching etiquette is Mrs Yanagihara’s forte, I fumble to offer my business card but can only find a horribly mangled one in my coat pocket. I dust off the lint, and hand it to her. She does not look impressed, instructs me to hang up my coat, turns, and leaves me with the two dozen women who are milling about chatting, tying aprons and readying their notebooks for the day’s class. I notice to one side a single, rather lonely looking white man in his early thirties with lanky hair. I sit at the front. There are some awkward moments during which many of the women giggle shyly and whisper behind their hands, and try to find seats away from me. Late arrivals are forced to sit beside me.
(Re Mrs Yanagihara. It now occurs to me that virtually all of the people I have met in Japan who have been self-proclaimed etiquette experts have also been among the rudest people I have met. For instance, at a book event in Kyoto once, a woman approached me as I was signing copies, handed me a card which described her as a ‘Mannerist’ – I don’t think it was a reference to the late Renaissance art movement – and asked if I was related to the late author Alan Booth, who had also written about Japan. ‘Oh, that’s disappointing,’ she said when I told her that I wasn’t. She then looked at me as if I had perpetrated some kind of fraud and stalked off. Meanwhile, on another occasion at a dinner in Japan I sat next to a woman who had gatecrashed the gathering and then spent the entire evening explaining to me how I had no understanding of Japanese manners whatsoever, while chewing her food with her mouth open like a cat throughout.)
Mrs Yanagihara coughs and rustles some papers, indicating that she requires silence. She begins the class by showing the latest magazine articles her son has been featured in, or written, and then introduces me, but I am busy taking notes at the time and not really paying attention.
‘Stand up!’ Mrs Yanagihara barks. I realise she is looking in my direction. I pause. Really? OK. I do what I am told, and take an awkward bow.
Her son, Naoyuki, enters, now wearing a knee-length white lab coat. He is going to show what gradually dawns on me is the advanced class on how to make traditional dishes from the Okayama Matsuri (‘matsuri’ means festival; Okayama is a city on the coast of the Inland Sea, west of Kobe). Maintaining a pout of concentration throughout, he proceeds to give a fascinating and brilliant cooking demonstration of such controlled skill and artistry that, at times, I quite forget that I am supposed to be taking notes, a lapse which I will later come to regret.
One of the dishes is the eel which he fillets in a matter of seconds, brushes with a tare and then grills, swamping the room with a mouth-watering aroma. Another features yam, which he grinds to a thin paste in a suribachi and surikogi (a Japanese-style ridged mortar and wooden pestle) but which he then somehow, miraculously, is still able to divide into pieces, lift from the bowl, wrap in nori and deep-fry, all using just his chopsticks, an astonishing display of technique. Meanwhile, he fillets a kohada (gizzard shad), blanches an octopus arm and prepares some sushi rice, pouring the seasoning vinegar over it via the broad back of a spoon, a nice trick to better distribute it more evenly. He prepares lily bulbs for simmering; transforms a turnip into a hexagonal, edible bowl, now beautifully translucent; and finely chops some brown ribbons which looked like wet tights (these, I later discover, are dried gourd ribbons, or ‘kampyo’, often used as an edible string in traditional Japanese cuisine, here chopped and added to the rice). Live shrimp are despatched into boiling water, then an ice bath, and then into soy sauce. And so on.
It is a virtuoso performance by a chef in his prime. He is so smooth, in such total control and command. Watching him make a Japanese-style omelette in a thin rectangular pan, wafting the base of the pan only vaguely in the vicinity of the gas flame to delicately set the eggs’ proteins, then flipping it using his chopsticks with a sublime
economy of motion, is like some kind of Noh theatre. All of this he does in silence, the only noise that of the extractor fans, the scratching of students’ pens on paper and the odd fluttery-eyed sigh. The demonstration ends in silence, too; no applause.
Naoyuki approaches me as the rest of the students move over to their workstations in the other part of the L-shaped room where they will begin to make the dishes they have just seen demonstrated.
‘So, Michael, are you ready?’
‘Hmm?’ Ready for what, I wonder. Our interview?
‘To join your group. Let me introduce you.’
It seems that I, too, am now expected to cook all of the dishes together with a group of five students, all of whom have been attending his classes for years, in some cases decades.
I catch the eye of the lone Western male student. His name is Ryan and he is from Texas. I thought this was a home-cooking class, I hiss to him desperately.
‘Yes, using “home cooking” to describe this can sound almost insulting,’ he sympathises. ‘This is kaiseki level cooking, make no mistake.’
Ryan has lived in Japan for seventeen years and, as a supplement to his language studies, he had wanted to learn how to cook authentic Japanese cuisine. ‘I asked around to find which cooking school to come to, and this one was generally considered the most serious for non-professional cooks,’ he says.