A couple of minutes later, at the exact time of our appointment, Sugino returns, now smiling, and invites me to join him at one of the tables where we talk for a while. As we do, a plate with three of his pieces arrives, much to my relief.
‘You want to try them first?’ Sugino asks, correctly interpreting my distracted manner. I tuck in first to a raspberry and pistachio mousse which defies the laws of physics with its lightness, and then a nine-layer apple cream piece, made with butter from Hokkaido (‘more mild-tasting than other butters’). They both look fairly conventional but the balance of flavours is exceptional, the moderate sweetness allowing the raspberry flavour to shine through, and the textures are ethereal. Then comes a chestnut and chocolate mousse; I may at this point have disgraced myself with some inadvertent groans of pleasure. When I finally lift my head from the plate, I see Sugino is watching me intently. I tell him how wonderful his cakes are, and his face – chubby cheeks, close-cropped hair, neatly trimmed goatee – relaxes into a smile.
Famously – in pastry circles, at least – some of Sugino’s patisserie are so fragile that he forbids customers from taking them away from the shop; they can only be consumed in situ. It seems he cannot bear the thought of his desserts being eaten in a less than perfect state. Others, like the Ambroisis, are made in very limited numbers. Why, I wondered, did he not make more, so he could sell more and make more money? Why didn’t he have other outlets, or stalls in depachika like many other famous patissiers did, both French and Japanese?
‘Because I make them all myself. Do you think Pierre Hermé works in all his shops? For me, quality is everything. I have no need for money. Number one: I love to work. But it was only after I turned sixty [up until this point I had assumed he was in his early fifties but he is sixty-two] that I started to enjoy working.’
Even at Christmas time, his busiest season, Sugino does most of the work himself, with help from just a few assistants, working fifteen-hour days to create around 800 Christmas cakes. A recent Japanese TV documentary revealed the physical toll this takes on him. The cameras followed him on a visit to his chiropractor, shuffling zombie-like, clearly in agony from standing for hours every day. The documentary made him famous in Japan for his almost masochistic dedication, showing him repeatedly submerging his hands in a bowl of iced water to keep them cool while working with heat-sensitive ingredients. ‘The mousses can be so delicate that they melt,’ he tells me. ‘So the moulds and my gloves are also cooled before I start, especially in summer.’
So, if not money, what was the motivation for this kind of extreme work ethic? ‘The source of my motivation is the smile of my guests. With the Christmas cake, I have been making that for twenty-five years, and the reaction from guests is amazing, so I always want to meet their expectations.’ It was essentially the same answer I had received from all the master craftsmen I had met in Japan – they do it for their customers. Their expectations give them the energy to keep going, to improve. Their pleasure is reward enough.
Up in his stainless steel-lined atelier next to the store Sugino shows me this year’s Christmas cake, a pear and fig concoction, not yet finished. He had been struggling with a fig mousse component because, apparently, figs have an enzyme which melts gelatine. The solution, he eventually discovered, was not just to use fig purée, but pieces of whole fig, too. How long had he been trying to solve this?
‘Fifteen years.’
Despite the fairly conclusive evidence to the contrary, Sugino claims to have no particular technical ability. He is ‘all thumbs’ he says, ‘not so good at delicate work, but my skills are getting better. The answers always come through working every day.’
He uses Valhrona chocolate, none of your bean-to-bar nonsense for him. That seems sensible: whatever we might want to believe, making chocolate is, really, an industrial process not to be undertaken lightly by bearded men in braces and leather aprons in hipster ghettos. But why, I wonder, did none of his current range use traditional Japanese ingredients, like matcha powder, yuzu or adzuki – all of which have been embraced by the Parisian super-patissiers?
‘I’ve never used yuzu or matcha because everyone else is using them,’ he tells me. ‘I don’t like to copy others. I only once made a cake based on another chef’s recipe but my staff said it was not my style. I don’t think of my works as being Japanese or French. They have the spirit of France, yes, but it is a bit like the Buddha: he was born in India, but Buddhism exists in Japan and Thailand with a different form. The spirit of Buddha is still alive here.
‘I don’t think that patissiers in Japan are highly skilled. According to my standards, the level is not so high. I think many Japanese patissiers rank as upper-middle. There are no particularly excellent patissiers in Japan. That’s the difference between Japan and Paris.’
As well as the latest special Christmas cake (for which orders usually begin in early November), Sugino was also working on a new book which he considered to be his legacy. I assumed it would detail the complexity of his professional output, but no. ‘It will be for home cooking, ordinary ingredients, so that people will be able to make them in their kitchens.’
As I am leaving, I still don’t feel I have even scratched the surface of what makes a man like Sugino tick. Where does he find his determination, how does he sustain his discipline? He stops wiping down a work surface, and smiles.
‘What drives me?’ he says, slowly shaking his head as if he doesn’t really understand it himself, or perhaps hasn’t even given it much thought. ‘Some power, some spirit.’
CHUBU / TOHOKU
Chapter 29
Mochi
The two men raise their heavy wooden mallets in the chill Ibaraki air. Charcoal smoke briefly envelops them, obscuring their vision and rendering their task even more perilous. The first man pauses, mallet held shakily aloft, as the second brings his weapon crashing down onto the mound of steamed rice, before wrestling it free from the sticky white mess. He stands clear and now the first man does likewise, smashing his mallet-head into the rice with a resounding ‘thwump’.
By now I am already familiar with the traditional methods for making mochi thanks to my time with Horiguchi-san in Minowa, so who are these two men risking shattered craniums to beat the hell out of a couple of kilos of rice in a hollowed-out tree trunk? And why is a young woman crouching beside them recording the dull thwacking of their hammers on her tape recorder?
One of the men is Rarecho, the talented forty-four-year-old anime artist who has been responsible for turning me and my family into what must go down as the least likely animated characters since SpongeBob SquarePants. Rarecho is wearing his trademark beanie hat and black-framed glasses. The other is a local man, Takabumi Suzuki, eighty, dressed in an orange baseball hat, plaid shirt and grey slacks, his face creased with smile lines. Suzuki-san has agreed to show me, Rarecho, the sound technician, and a small army of animators and producers who have assembled this afternoon at a former high school, now a culture and crafts retreat, how to make mochi the traditional way.
We are here to research a new, extra episode of the cartoon series, an extended New Year’s special on the theme of ‘osechi ryori’, the dishes eaten on ‘O-Shogatsu’, or New Year’s Day – probably the most important holiday in the Japanese calendar.
There are many osechi ryori dishes which are unique to this time of year, but for most Japanese New Year is synonymous with mochi. This is why, up in the hills of Ibaraki, Rarecho and Suzuki-san are engaged in the ‘mochi-suki’, the perilous practice of pounding rice with oak mallets, called ‘keyaki’, in the ‘usu’, a chunk of hollowed-out tree trunk (in this case a 130-year-old cedar) which, before the advent of machines, was the only way to make mochi (there is one other way: each year at Yokohama’s Hakkeijima Sea Paradise, they entrust the mochi-pounding to walruses).
Making mochi this way is still an evocative experience for many Japanese. It seems an almost spiritual ritual with the power to bring a people, who can seem to have become ra
ther isolated by the relentless progress of twenty-first century technology, back in touch with their agricultural past. The smell of the charcoal and the cooked rice has awoken something in the group here: nostrils twitch, smiles spread, a giddy mood is blossoming.
Suzuki-san stands aside and invites me to take over in concert with Rarecho, each of us taking turns to bring our mallet crashing down onto the large ball of rice like members of a chain gang breaking up a large rock. Now, Rarecho is a wonderful artist, but I am literally trusting him with my life as, one slightly mistimed strike, and his mallet could come crashing down on my cranium, and likewise mine upon his. But we take it slowly, making sure the other’s head is clear of the hammer zone.
Every once in a while Suzuki-san stops us, dabs some more water on the rice to stop our hammers sticking and gives it a quick knead, slapping it back down into the tree hollow like a super-dense bread dough. I am grateful for the pause. It is hard work pounding mochi. Rice farmers used to consider this a ‘day off’, their New Year’s holiday, Suzuki tells us. Apparently, an awful lot of sake would have been consumed during the mochi-making which is a frightening thought. Rubbing my sore biceps, I joke that they should make it an official sport for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Someone else says it helps if they imagine the rice is the face of their boss.
After a good half-hour of pounding, there comes a brief, even more dangerous phase of mochi-making in which one man massages the dough by hand in between repeated hammer-pounding by the other (it is at this stage that you would add sugar if you were making sweet mochi), then, finally, Suzuki-san lifts up the finished mound of mochi – enough of it to fill both arms – and we follow him inside. Here, he shows us how to pinch a piece of the dough between our thumbs and forefingers, and then twist it off into a bite-sized morsel. We then roll the pieces either in adzuki bean paste or kinako – toasted, ground soy bean powder, one of my absolute favourite Japanese ingredients.
The third option is to add the mochi clumps to a light vegetable broth, ‘zoni’. There are many regional differences with this New Year’s soup: in Kanto, eastern Japan where we are now, they typically use chicken and soy, while in Kyoto the New Year’s zoni is made with white miso; in Kyushu it’s a fish broth with grilled shrimp; on Shikoku they use sweet mochi, and so on.
It is this zoni mochi which nearly kills me.
Every 1 January, several elderly Japanese choke to death on mochi. I had never really understood how this was possible, having eaten tons of mochi in the past with no difficulty. It is ironic, then, that the first mochi I make myself very nearly does for me, too.
We have literally just been talking about the annual deaths caused by mochi and I had expressed my usual bemusement: ‘I just don’t understand how anyone could be stupid enough to choke to death on a piece of mochi!’ I say, shaking my head.
I take a bowl of the broth, slurp a little and pluck out a pristine blob of mochi with my chopsticks. This is the first time I have eaten mochi in a savoury soup and so I am completely unprepared for the challenge of dealing with a super-slippery, squash-ball-sized piece of pounded rice. It slides down my throat before my tongue and teeth are able to coordinate to render it more digestible, lodging there like Augustus Gloop in the chocolate tube. I struggle for a few seconds as the terrible realisation dawns that I can’t actually breathe. Sheer Englishness prevents me from drawing anyone’s attention to this, so instead I launch into an involuntary gagging-bucking-rocking, like a cat with a recalcitrant furball, eyes bulging, face reddening, panic rising. Finally, I manage to swallow the damn thing whole like a python downing a goat (I am sure it creates a visible bulge in my throat as it goes down). I feel it slowly descend to my abdominal area like a gold brick falling through quicksand, where I suspect it resides to this day, like some monstrous interior goitre.
I breathe a sigh of relief that I have managed to deal with the mochi myself and haven’t had to seek humiliating assistance, and pluck another one from the soup. It is delicious.
Afterwards, I chat a little with Suzuki-san. ‘In the old times they said mochi gave you more energy. Farmers would take ten pieces with them when they worked in the fields, with a lot of sake of course,’ he says. He recalls a time when communities would gather at New Year to make mochi together, and at other times to help each other with harvests, or even funerals. ‘Now they just employ a company to do it,’ he sighs. He also remembers when people would visit shrines regularly, and the womenfolk would gather at the crescent moon. ‘There were always festivals, all the time, to please the kami.’ These are the gods which are said to inhabit natural and even manmade things: trees, rivers, rocks, washing machines and so on, thousands of gods, all to be appeased, cajoled and persuaded according to the animistic principles of Shintoism.
Days later, I see there is still a small piece of mochi encrusted in my phone case as, once again, I take a deep sigh and turn on data roaming. I am lost somewhere in central Tokyo, in search of Rarecho and the team. We are due to meet for the second element of our research for the new programme – an osechi ryori lunch featuring traditional New Year’s Day dishes, prepared for us by octogenarian Hisae Ooka.
Finally having found them, we walk together to the quiet, upmarket residential district where Ooka-san lives. Her home for the past forty years is an apartment unusual for the Japanese capital in both its large size and extensive carpeting, with that familiar memento-cluttered, hermetically sealed atmosphere of grandmothers’ homes everywhere.
Ooka-san has taught cooking for most of her adult life. She first learned at the Yanagihara cooking school with the grandfather Toshio Yanagihara himself, attending classes every fortnight for over ten years. She also found time to become a high-jump champion and athletics trainer, something she continues to do even at this advanced age.
Straight-backed, with her hair stiffly coiffed, Ooka-san is an imposing figure of a woman. She is dressed in a polka-dot blouse with a black skirt, with black pearls and a gold bracelet. After the usual introductions in her living room, she shows us through to the dining room.
Traditionally, it is forbidden to actually cook anything on New Year’s Day, Ooka-san explains; everything must be pre-prepared, which of course has an impact on the types of dishes served. She has spent more than a day and a half preparing our meal, with help from two assistants, one of whom is her grandson, Koyata. It is a kaleidoscopic spread, featuring twenty-five different dishes made with over fifty ingredients. There are carrots pared into flowers; tiny mountain potatoes; even tinier silver fish; strips of squid; glossy edamame beans; one dish is flecked with gold leaf; there is yellow omelette; and pink and white strips of kamoboko (minced, steamed fish), somehow contrived into knots. Several other of the dishes are unrecognisable to me, and all are served in elegant gold and black lacquer boxes with red interiors, along with red and blue Arita bowls. For each guest, there is a fan-shaped, gold lacquered plate and a choice of crystal sake cups offered from a tray.
We begin with a sip of rather bitter herbal sake, traditionally served only at New Year. ‘I believe happiness is in the circle of people, and food is the best way to gather that circle,’ pronounces Ooka-san, indicating with a formal nod that we may commence eating.
As with other forms of traditional Japanese cooking, symbolism and meaning abound within Osechi dishes. Take the herring roe which Ooka-san served for us. The ‘kazunoko’, as it is known, was poached in dashi and had an eyebrow-raising crunch-pop texture (it is almost a treat to find one of the eggs in your teeth hours later) but the eggs also symbolise fertility and have particular significance for people wishing for children (or grandchildren) in the coming year. The name itself has the kind of double or even triple meaning – Japanese people relish that kind of thing: ‘kazu’ means number and ‘ko’ means child, but in the language of the indigenous Ainu people of northern Japan ‘kado’ means herring.
Among the many other dishes on the table are kuromame – black soy beans – ‘mame’ meaning both ‘bean’ and ‘heal
th’. Not all of the meanings revolve around wordplay, some are visual puns: the pink and white of the kamobuko knots (fish paste steamed into a rubbery textured product) symbolises the rising sun, symbol of Japan itself, of course, while the bent-backed pose of the cooked shrimp is supposed to evoke the elderly. There is usually some gold or yellow included in an osechi ryori spread – both are celebratory colours – in this case they are represented in a sweet potato mash with chunks of whole chestnut and gold leaf.
‘The chestnuts must be whole. You cannot cut them into smaller pieces,’ warns Ooka-san. ‘They symbolise nuggets of gold, and we want whole gold!’ Some of the Osechi taxonomy loses a little in translation, however: I can’t quite grasp how one can ‘see the future through the holes in the sliced lotus root’, for instance.
As we begin to eat, it strikes me that many of the osechi ryori dishes, like the potato-chestnuts, are unusually sweet: lots of other ingredients have been simmered or steeped in mirin, sugar, vinegar or soy.
‘Yes, sugar and vinegar were traditionally used to preserve New Year’s food for three days, so the women didn’t have to work,’ says Ooka-san. It still seems like a huge amount of work for the woman of the house to provide herself with a day or two off.
‘It is important to pass down our ethnic character. These traditions and festivals all have a special meaning, and New Year’s is the biggest,’ she continues. ‘We have passed down these dishes in my family from generation to generation; my aunt was a cooking teacher who worked until she was ninety-six – she has just turned one hundred. The first thing to teach the young is educating their palate, teaching them what good produce tastes like.
The Meaning of Rice Page 26