Naoyuki interrupts to introduce me to my ‘team’ – Noriko, Junko, Nitani (this was her second name, I didn’t get her first), Setsuko and Michiko. Michiko is rather stern, with glasses hanging on a chain around her neck like a librarian; Nitani-san is super-smiley and tiny, barely reaching up to my hip; Setsuko tells me she travels all the way from Himeji for the class – three hours by Shinkansen; Noriko, the youngest, speaks the best English and it is she who patiently guides me through the four hours of cooking, concealing well her irritation at being lumbered with the hopeless gaijin (foreigner).
They set me to work making the omelette. This may not seem a big deal but is nevertheless a gross misjudgement of my abilities. Though I can make French-style omelettes in my sleep, Japanese omelettes are a much more demanding art requiring a special rectangular pan and an experienced eye for temperature control. I have never made one before but, miraculously, the first I turn out is pretty much perfect. The next, though, is a mess of overcooked eggy ribbons. I also ruin the shrimp by peeling them before I cook them which renders them horrid, grey, chewy curlicues. And then comes the eel, which I at least manage to skewer through its eye in order to fix it to the chopping board, but mess up royally thereafter.
Naoyuki rescues me with his golf-swing assistance, and, slowly, my team of capable cooks and I work towards the end of our multi-course, Okayama festival dishes. When we are done, some time after everyone else is finished (entirely my fault, although no one openly blames me), we eat together at our workstation.
Afterwards, I finally get some time to talk with Naoyuki. I am keen to hear his view on the current state of Japanese cuisine.
‘Two things have happened in the last few years,’ he says as we sit in the upstairs TV studio (the school has its own TV studio). ‘There was the earthquake in 2011, and the UNESCO World Heritage status awarded to Japanese food in 2013. The first, I think, made people realise how little they knew about cooking. For two weeks, some people in Fukushima could not buy food, they didn’t have electricity or gas. Lots of Japanese cannot even cook rice, you know, but our students, they can cook rice over a wood fire, so we teach useful skills which are disappearing. A lot of new students came to us after that.’
He admits the impact of UNESCO’s award was probably greater domestically than internationally. ‘Japanese people realised Japanese cooking was very cool for people outside of the country, that we have some real treasures, and that foreigners were coming here for the food, to see Tsukiji and things like that.’
The Yanagihara school does not claim to be a cooking school for professional chefs, like Le Cordon Bleu; it is a place to train the next generation of home cooks in the ways of past home cooks. It’s great that people go to nice restaurants, but they don’t realise that Japanese food culture begins with the family, in the home. They need to learn about techniques, ingredients, the seasons. That’s why we only teach Japanese cooking, not how to make pasta or pizza.
‘My grandfather was taught by his mother, he was the first male to learn to cook in his family. He started the school in the 1950s because he was already worried that the traditional style of Japanese cooking he had learned was breaking up. The Japanese were eating a lot of bread, using oils for frying, which is not the Japanese way. Japanese cuisine is a cuisine of water, not oil. He realised that Japanese food culture is made by the housewives, not the restaurant chefs. The wives and mothers create the palate of their children when they feed their babies. That was why my grandfather felt we should teach the housewives.’
Wasn’t this approach perhaps a little outdated? Didn’t men have an equal responsibility in the kitchen?
Naoyuki hesitates. ‘Yes, but men are more busy. It is a Japanese problem. They work late, and a lot. Sometimes when they retire they come here to study. I know that women can’t make food every day, but they can on Saturdays and Sundays. These should be the days when they spend time with their families, not go out to restaurants. They should be at home, making Japanese food, but even the grandmothers these days don’t know how to cook. A lot of Japanese cooking teachers don’t even know traditional Japanese food.’ He shakes his head in despair.
Naoyuki’s grandfather, Toshio, died when Naoyuki was twelve years old, after which his culinary training was left to his father, but his grandfather was able to pass on a special symbolic gift before he died.
‘In Japan, it is a custom that on the sixth of June in the year you turn six, that is the day when, if you start something, you can become an expert,’ recalls Naoyuki. ‘That was when my grandfather gave me my chefs’ knives.’
Naoyuki has recently been named a Japanese Cultural Envoy, an honour usually reserved for practitioners of traditional arts – dancers or musicians – but following the UNESCO announcement the Ministry of Cultural Affairs felt they ought to have a representative from the culinary world. In a pattern that seems familiar from my dealings with the Japanese – who love formal gestures but don’t always think them through in terms of content – everyone involved felt it was a great honour, but no one seemed to be clear about what it entailed. Another well-meaning but vague hope involves the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. It will be a major opportunity to show Japanese food to the world, Naoyuki feels, but he is not quite sure how Japan will make the most of it yet.
‘I don’t know what we can do, but we have some study groups looking at it. I heard there were lots of cultural things with the London Olympics. I think the most important thing is to show the world what real Japanese cooking is. There are a lot of fake Japanese restaurants around the world, but if chefs know what is the true Japanese style, that might change and authentic Japanese restaurants will increase.’
Towards the end of our conversation, as I am getting up to leave, Naoyuki’s wife enters the studio, carrying their seven-month-old son, Shutaro. We coo over the baby for a while. He is adorable. It is eleven at night now and Naoyuki has been up since six to go to Tsukiji to buy fish. He and I are both flagging, but the next generation of the Yanagihara cooking dynasty, in whose hands the destiny of traditional Japanese home cooking may well lie, is wide awake and bright as a button.
Chapter 28
Cake
I am becoming obsessed by obsession, by the single-minded dedication and discipline of shokunin like Jiro-san, the Arita potters, and soba and mochi masters Hibiya and Horiguchi. I have got it into my head that I want somehow to pass on to my sons some sense of their unwavering focus on the process, rather than on the transient results of their endeavours; if they can understand what is becoming for me some kind of a self-evident ‘life truth’, I think it will serve them well in the coming years.
Since my first visit to Japan I have been fascinated by the meticulous perfection of Japanese patisserie. Having lived in Paris for three years I know my way around a fancy cake shop, but I had never seen cakes as delicate and precise as those in Tokyo. I have spent literally hours trawling the depachika – the department store basement food halls – marvelling at glass cabinets filled with immaculate Mont Blancs, mille-feuilles, operas and macarons.
Japanese patisserie is, I think, one of the few areas where cuisine approaches art, at least in the purely decorative sense. I was going to qualify that by stating it would be ridiculous to say that I find meaning in an eclair but, actually, I probably do – a ‘religieuse’ experience, you could say (*Cough* One for the cake nerds, there), after all, Proust found meaning enough in a madeleine. Put it another way, can you think of any other handmade product which exhibits this level of technical accomplishment, is this pretty to look at, this satisfying sensually, not to mention in terms of one’s appetite (well, if you eat enough of them …), for sale anywhere in the world for the same price as a crappy cup of Starbucks’ brown water? Original paintings, sculptures or ceramics made by masters of their art are way out of most people’s reach; the same goes for 1960s Ferraris, Charles Eames chairs or Fabergé eggs. Even in the dining world, a meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant will often run to three figures, as w
ill a decent bottle of Bordeaux, yet in the glass display cabinets of the Tokyo patisseries every day you will find original examples of the apogee of their form, made fresh by the greatest practitioners of their art in the world, craftsmen and women who have spent years perfecting their technique, and on sourcing and understanding how to work with the very best ingredients, all on sale for just a couple of quid a pop.
I’ve always wanted to meet one of the people behind these incredible pieces of patisserie. What drives them to work with such fanatical precision and dedication within such a tiny framework, and for so little financial reward? I also have a nerdy curiosity about the technical challenges of creating those helium-light mousses or keeping biscuit bases crunchy beneath a moist fruit topping. Within that ‘little bit (two inches wide) of ivory’, as Jane Austen described her canvas, there can be as many as seven or eight components – sponge, mousse, ganache, fruit, jam, sugarwork, biscuit, ice cream, sorbet, glaze, crème pâtissière, Chantilly – using maybe twenty basic ingredients, all assembled into often perilously fragile, transient, gravity-defying constructions.
Hidemi Sugino is Tokyo’s most revered patissier. He is the first Asian to win the Coupe du Monde de la Pâtisserie (in 1991), the cake world’s Bocuse d’Or, and was named the best pastry chef in Asia in 2015. Sugino is a master of his craft at the very top of his game. Famed for making the most beautiful ‘entremets’ – Russian dolls of the cake world with different layers of perfectly matched flavours and textures – Sugino’s creations boast the most delicate mousses made with the bare minimum of gelatine and sugar, and the most airy sponge bases. Initially, his cakes appear to be nothing particularly extraordinary or innovative, the flavour pairings are the familiar coffee and caramel, raspberry and pistachio, mint and chocolate, and so on; they exhibit none of the shock avant-gardism you sometimes find in Europe where you see everything from olive oil to coffee grounds or cereal milk (actually, even mother’s milk) used in desserts. He just uses chocolate, nuts and the standard palette of patissier’s fruits – raspberries, blueberries, peaches, strawberries – seasonal, of course, so summer might bring coconut and passion fruit, chestnuts dominate in autumn, citrus in winter and so on. This is classical French patisserie yet it is executed at a level rarely seen even in Paris.
Having initially worked as a young man in the kitchens of Tokyo’s legendary Hotel Okura, Sugino continued his professional journey in Paris, learning his craft at Patisserie Peltier, now sadly defunct. He had moved to Paris in 1989 to do a stage, or internship, at another restaurant, but one day on a trip to buy a birthday cake for his niece at a different patisserie, Sugino disembarked at the Duroc Metro station by mistake and found himself looking in the window of Peltier. He was dazzled. He bought a cake, tasted it, and his life was changed for ever.
‘It was so fabulous, a tartelette orange,’ he tells me one day when I meet him at his Tokyo store in an otherwise featureless backstreet in Kyobashi. For a moment, he is transported back to that Damascene moment over two decades ago. ‘I particularly remember the pastry – it was so perfectly cooked.’
Sugino-san plucked up the courage to return to Peltier and ask if there were any opportunities to work, unpaid, and inveigled his way into what was at the time one of the great dessert kitchens in Paris. He ended up working there for three years, mastering pastry and macarons, mousses and pâté à choux, and all the other miraculous substances which make up the patisser’s armoury. Clearly, something extraordinary was awoken within this man during his time at Peltier as, within two years, he was lifting that first prize in the Coupe du Monde de la Pâtisserie on behalf of Japan. It was and is the international peak of competitive cake-making and his victory came as a great surprise to all, not least Sugino himself.
‘Back then, the Japanese were known for their decoration, but they were not so good at flavours,’ he recalls. He had trained for the competition for six months, unheard of preparation in those days. ‘When the final announcement was being made, I remember they said the third place first. It was Canada. The French team was so confident they would win, but then they announced the second place was France. I just thought Belgium would win. It was so dramatic when they said, “First place: Japan”.’
Sugino maintains the Coupe du Monde changed neither his life nor the course of patisserie in Japan. The latter had been well under way since his former boss André Lecomte had arrived to take charge of desserts at the Hotel Okura in 1963.
Now forgotten by most, Lecomte’s arrival was a seismic moment in the history of European cuisine in Japan. Lecomte stayed in Japan until his death in 1999, training an entire generation of patissiers and almost single-handedly introducing proper bread-making and Viennoiserie to Japan via his shop in Roppongi, which was the first of its kind in Japan. According to his obituary in French catering trade bible L’Hôtellerie Restauration, by the time Lecomte passed away this plump, pink little man, who back in France had been orphaned at the age of thirteen, had built up an extraordinary empire of five shops, a restaurant (Le Toucan), a brewery, four tea rooms, a factory and a catering company employing 200 people.
Lecomte began his career with an eight-year apprenticeship at the George V Hotel in Paris, but was working for the Shah of Iran when he was encouraged by a French tour operator to move to Tokyo ahead of the 1964 Olympics. That first Tokyo Olympics was another of the major food moments in Japanese history. It was the first time that French chefs were introduced to the beauty, simplicity and seasonality of Japanese cuisine. From that awakening, nouvelle cuisine was born, which rejected the heavy sauces, the fat and dairy of Auguste Escoffier and the nineteenth century in favour of simplicity, seasonality and more considered plating.
Back in the early sixties, the Hotel Okura was pretty much the only top-quality Western-style hotel in all Japan; when Lecomte began working there he was its only foreign member of staff out of 1,500 people, but soon word spread of his extraordinary desserts which were so very different from the adzuki- and mochi-based wagashi to which the Japanese were accustomed.
Lecomte married a Japanese woman, Yasuko, who ran her own tea room, and he soon began supplying food to the city’s foreign diplomats and, eventually, to the Emperor himself. In 1968 he transformed his wife’s tea room into a French bakery, and went on to cook for visiting dignitaries including the Pope and various royals, as well as a long list of visiting French presidents: Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing, Mitterrand and Chirac. There are still branches of A. Lecomte in Ginza and in department stores in Tokyo. He paved the way for the likes of Robuchon, Bocuse and other French chefs to conquer Japan with their own restaurants and branded products, a trend which continues today.
It seems as if Lecomte was struck, too, by the Japanese sense of duty and dedication. Perhaps this was why he stayed so long in Japan. L’Hôtellerie Restauration quotes him as saying, ‘In Japan, we never relax. The Japanese work a lot. I like them. Daily discipline is the key to all success.’
On the other hand, there are all sorts of horror stories from foreigners who have worked in the kitchens of Paris, from Orwell to Gordon Ramsay, and the Japanese do seem to suffer the most. The great Japanese kaiseki master, Yoshihiro Murata, shuddered when he recalled his time in French kitchens when I first interviewed him some years ago. I wondered how Sugino had been treated by the French?
‘I counted myself lucky to have been allowed in, but the treatment was very bad. For example, we were not allowed to use the same showers as the French chefs, we had to shower along with the workers from Mauritius or the washing-up staff from Africa. Sometimes the French chefs asked me, “Why are you so yellow?” and I would tell them it was because I ate too much sweetcorn. I’d ask them, ‘Why are you so white? Because you eat too much wheat?”’
Sugino eventually returned to his home city of Kobe, where he opened his own patisserie. It is telling that Sugino is a Kobe boy. In Japan, Kobe is synonymous with Western-style patisserie; it is Cake City: the central shopping district is full of amazing patisser
ies. Dozens of them. Ever since it had been one of the first Japanese ports to open up to the outside world in the late nineteenth century, Kobe has been considered the capital of cosmopolitan sophistication and fashion, and cake remains one of the most obvious manifestations of this. Sugino opened his first shop in 1992 in the Kitano district, traditionally home to the city’s large expat population (I urge you to visit Kitano if you can, by the way: it has some of the strangest and most charming museums in the world, housed in the old colonial mansions of consuls and traders from Spain, Britain, France, Holland and Germany). In 2001, he moved to Tokyo and opened this store in the Kyobashi district of central Tokyo.
The store opens at 11 a.m., by which time there is usually a queue of a dozen or so fans. The most popular creations sell out within an hour. You have to be quick to grab one of the ten examples of the Ambroisi he makes a day – this is an ethereally light chocolate mousse cake with a raspberry jam, pistachio mousse and pistachio ‘joconde’ (a biscuity sponge) at its core, all covered in a chocolate glaze with a gloss like the paint on a brand new Lexus. This is the piece which won him the Coupe du Monde in 1991. The recipe, which I found translated online, is extraordinarily complex and precise, calling for thirty-eight different quantities of ingredients, including 38g of pistachio paste (not 37g, or 39g). He only uses 4g of gelatine to set 550g of cream/milk/eggs, an unusually low ratio. Another of Sugino’s hallmarks is that he minimises the sweetness of his cakes. There is no sugary throat burn with his desserts.
By the time I arrive for my meeting with Sugino in the early afternoon, all of the Ambroisis have been sold and the cabinet in the front of the shop is already looking sparse. In front of me is a customer trying to make up her mind. As I inwardly urge her to get on with it so that I can try some cake for myself, Sugino appears from a door to the rear of the seated area where daintily dressed Japanese women are already tentatively nibbling at their prized patisserie. He sees me, the only foreigner in the store, scowls to himself – I was early – turns to mumble some instructions to a server, then retreats once more into a side door.
The Meaning of Rice Page 25