The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice

by Trevor Corson

  “Hygiene!” Zoran yelled. “Adjust your hats!”

  Kate was riding high after the party at Paramount. For the first time since she’d arrived at sushi school she’d actually believed it was possible she could graduate and become a sushi chef. Maybe her lack of kitchen skills didn’t matter. She’d proved to herself that she could interact with customers while squeezing together raw fish and rice. If she kept practicing, she wouldn’t even need help from the robot.

  Zoran interrupted Kate’s reverie. He was telling the class that if they wanted to be sushi chefs, they couldn’t just squeeze together raw fish and rice. They had to have kitchen skills, and they had to know how to cook. And not just cook, but to cook the multi-course courtly cuisine of Japan. A good sushi chef could toss out several fancy appetizers from a repertoire of traditional cuisine before he even started serving sushi. This was part of the craft of omakase.

  The word omakase means “I leave it up to you.” It’s what the sophisticated customer says to the chef when settling down at the sushi bar. Sushi connoisseurs seldom order off a menu. Traditionally, sushi bars in Japan didn’t even have menus. Omakase is an invitation to the chef—not just to serve what he thinks are the freshest ingredients of the day but also to show off his skills. And for any serious sushi chef, that includes cooking.

  Zoran explained that courtly Japanese cuisine was called kaiseki. “Kaiseki cuisine originated from the traditional Japanese tea ceremony,” Zoran said. “It was the meal eaten at the end of the ceremony.”

  Kaiseki is a meal of many small dishes served one after another, Zoran told them. Sushi at the sushi bar is the same way: a meal of many small servings of different fish. In modern American terms, kaiseki and sushi are both a sort of chef’s tasting menu.

  “Open your textbooks!” Zoran yelled. “Kate! Please read!”

  Kate scrambled to get her book open, then cleared her throat and began in a monotone. The goal of the book, the author had written, was not to teach recipes. “The real purpose,” Kate read, “is to teach you how to cook in the spirit of Japan, whose pure and restrained effects with food constitute an art.”

  Her classmates could barely hear her over the hum of refrigerators and freezers. Zoran interrupted Kate to add commentary.

  “A Japanese person doesn’t feel he’s eaten dinner until he’s eaten rice,” Zoran said. “And miso soup should be at the end of the meal. When a Westerner sits down and orders miso soup to start, you know he doesn’t know anything about Japanese food.”

  Zoran took over the reading in a loud voice. He jumped to a paragraph about drinking sake, the age-old Japanese rice liquor. Sake was a good accompaniment to kaiseki-style appetizers. But according to centuries of Japanese thinking, sake clashes with food that contains rice because the flavors of rice and rice liquor are too similar. Traditionally, sake and rice were never served together. Today, however, sushi restaurants serve as much sake as they can. Sushi restaurants have high food costs. Pushing expensive sake is one way to make money.

  Zoran moved on to a note about chopsticks. It seems that the Japanese have always had a thing about contamination. The textbook stated that at home, many Japanese use only their own personal pair of chopsticks, which are often small works of art, lacquered and decorated with inlay. But for a formal meal in a restaurant, people eat with cheap disposable chopsticks of unfinished cedar or bamboo. That way, they can be sure no one else’s lips have tainted their eating implements. The cost of purity is stiff. Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture estimates that the Japanese discard 25 billion pairs of chopsticks a year. Deforestation is leading some restaurants in Japan to switch to plastic. Many Americans believe it’s proper etiquette to rub their disposable chopsticks together before eating, to remove splinters. In Japan this is considered impolite.

  “For omakase,” Zoran said, “you might start with three kaiseki-style appetizers.” The appetizers could be small simmered or grilled dishes that use any number of ingredients. Then the chef would serve fish. “You want to move from light to heavy, and be seasonal,” Zoran said. “For example, white fish, followed by scallops, followed by octopus. Those are all light, clean flavors. Then serve salmon or tuna, the heavier-flavored fish.”

  Zoran grabbed a thick photo album off the shelf. “Okay, gather round.”

  The pictures showed kaiseki-style appetizers that previous classes at the academy had cooked. “Some of these were absolutely terrible,” Zoran said. “But it gives you a sense of the variety.”

  The elaborate sushi meals Zoran was describing seemed a far cry from modern sushi’s humble origins as fast food, served from stalls in old Tokyo.

  In the decades after nigiri first appeared on the streets of Edo in the early 1800s, the shogun’s authority was undercut by political maneuvering. Behind the scenes, a noble named Seki Nakano amassed enormous power. As it happened, his mansion was close to Yohei Sushi, the shop that belonged to Yohei Hanaya, the man who first marketed nigiri successfully. That section of the city was, in a sense, “sushi central.” After Yohei Sushi’s success, a second large sushi shop had opened nearby, Pine Sushi.

  Lords and officials seeking to influence Nakano passed by the sushi shops on their way to the mansion. Pine Sushi started to display extraordinary boxes of takeout sushi, involving a variety of different toppings on nigiri, many of them prepared with elaborate cooking or pickling methods. Yohei Sushi quickly followed suit. These fancy sushi boxes became the gift of choice for winning Nakano’s favor, and grew more and more elaborate as visitors strove to outdo each other with their presents.

  The idea spread, and shops sprang up around the city for selling elaborate sushi gift boxes. The extravagance of these shops and the prices paid for their sushi surpassed even the most exclusive and expensive sushi bars of the fabled Ginza district in contemporary Tokyo.

  The appearance of extravagant sushi matched a general trend in the city of Edo, as merchants and artisans with disposable income became epicures and used gourmet food as a fashion statement. The samurai forgot their military skills and fell into lives of indulgence and idle luxury.

  Soon the political winds shifted. In the early 1840s, a group of conservative bureaucrats decided to clamp down. The government issued prohibitions against extravagance. Nakano was stripped of power, and soldiers swept through the city, rounding up prostitutes, pornographers—and sushi chefs. Pine Sushi and Yohei Sushi were shut down, and over 200 employees of fancy sushi shops were arrested.

  Lucky for sushi, the reforms didn’t last, and the ringleader of the bureaucrats was ousted. Within a year or two, the high-end sushi shops were back in business, and even average citizens began to treat themselves to an occasional box of fancy sushi.

  The stores prepared sushi to go or delivered it to the customer at his home or business. When the chefs packed the sushi to go, they separated the nigiri with decorative bamboo leaves. The leaves prevented the flavors from contaminating each other and added a mild antibacterial function. For their customers who were aristocrats, they even carved the family’s crest from a bamboo leaf and used it to decorate the sushi. The green pieces of decorative plastic that are still served with takeout sushi are a carryover from these early practices. Some brands of plastic leaf are even coated with antibacterial chemicals.

  Over time, some of the fancy to-go shops installed counters out front, similar to the street stalls, where pedestrians could stand and eat. A few shops added counters inside the shops or even tatamimat rooms where diners could sit. Either way, the chef generally knelt on his heels on a raised platform behind the counter, usually behind a latticework barrier.

  After World War II, the American occupation authorities banned outdoor food stalls as a health hazard. So when sushi chefs started up their businesses again after the war, sushi moved indoors. Chefs retained the spirit of a stand-up stall by building high counters with rows of stools. Now the chefs stood while they made sushi instead of sitting. The twentieth-century sushi bar was born.

  Wit
h cheap sushi no longer available on the street, people of modest means could not afford it. Working-class Japanese would have to wait decades until inexpensive conveyor-belt sushi restaurants appeared, returning sushi to its humbler roots. In the meantime, sushi chefs at the fancier sushi bars added elements of kaiseki cooking to the elaborate, multicourse meals they served, taking the high end of sushi further into the realm of extravagance.

  Zoran led the students past the long sushi bar at the back of the classroom and into the kitchen. He pulled two large metal trays from the restaurant’s walk-in cooler.

  The sushi toppings from which the chefs would pick while working at the sushi bar sat arrayed on small ceramic trays, each tightly wrapped in plastic wrap. There were slabs of tuna, salmon, yellowtail, flounder, and egg omelet; fillets of mackerel and grilled eel; pieces of octopus and squid; containers of spicy tuna mix, shredded snow crab, capelin roe, flying fish roe, and sea urchin roe.

  “I want you to make one dish,” Zoran said. “Everything has to be from scratch. You have fifteen minutes to read from your book. Then you have one hour to make it.”

  Kate looked at Zoran, not comprehending. The other students stared at the trays of ingredients.

  Zoran snatched up some ingredients for himself. He grabbed a stainless-steel mixing bowl and pulled a stockpot from a shelf. Within seconds he was slicing and dicing and cooking.

  The students stood still, in shock.

  “See,” Zoran barked, “this is what happens when you’re at the sushi bar doing omakase. You get put on the spot!”

  11

  INSIDE THE ROLL

  The students swung into action, assembling cooked appetizers. Kate froze. An hour and a half later, she’d managed to cut only a few pieces of vegetables and fish, and she hadn’t figured out how to cook any of them. Zoran critiqued the other students’ steaming hot dishes. He pretended not to notice Kate’s cold plate.

  The next morning he moved on to a new lesson.

  “Set up your sushi stations!” Zoran barked.

  For the party at Paramount, he’d taught the students to make hand rolls. Now it was time for them to make proper sushi rolls, using a bamboo mat.

  In Japan, sushi rolls are an afterthought. A sushi chef might squeeze together a simple roll at the end of the meal, just to make sure his customer leaves with a full stomach. But in America, sushi is all about rolls. And most of the sushi rolls in America have never been served in Japan. For starters, American rolls are inside out.

  The California roll is considered the key innovation that made sushi accessible to Americans. The roll was invented in L.A.’s Little Tokyo in the late 1960s, at Tokyo Kaikan, one of the first restaurants to open a sushi bar, and the premier Japanese eatery in L.A. The California roll’s inventor was a chef there named Ichir Mashita.

  The California roll has come to be seen as a stroke of genius: the chef who devised it must have read the American mind, the thinking goes, and adapted sushi to American tastes.

  In fact, the California roll wasn’t primarily invented for the American palate at all. At first, the sushi bar at Tokyo Kaikan was patronized by a mostly Japanese clientele. The chefs there simply had difficulty obtaining fresh fatty tuna belly—called toro in Japanese—on a regular basis.

  But truckloads of avocados were readily available in California. An avocado is nearly a third fat, equivalent to well-marbled meat. Avocado melts in the mouth sort of like fatty tuna.

  First, Mashita tried mixing avocado with shrimp to give it a reddish color and the flavor of seafood. Later, he settled on crab meat. He served the mixture inside a traditional sushi roll—to his Japanese customers—to remind them of the fatty tuna back home. According to one report, three months passed before someone came up with the name “California roll.”

  It wasn’t until later, as sushi spread beyond Little Tokyo and chefs started to appeal to American customers, that someone hatched the idea of making an inside-out roll. The point of the inside-out roll was to hide the seaweed.

  According to an oft-told tale, in the late 1800s, the first Americans to visit Japan saw people eating the thin, crisp sheets of seaweed called nori and reported with shock that the Japanese ate black paper. In a sense, that wasn’t far off. Nori was invented in Asakusa, a district of Tokyo famous for its paper making. The first nori manufacturers borrowed traditional Japanese paper-making techniques and applied them to seaweed.

  The Japanese have been eating seaweed for more than two thousand years. By contrast, the Greeks and Romans disliked seaweed and fed it only to livestock, and only in emergencies. Yet the ancestors of many Americans enjoyed a version of nori. In the British Isles, coastal residents simmer the same type of seaweed, called laver, to make a paste that can be formed into patties, rolled in oatmeal, and fried to make laverbread, a breakfast treat accompanied by bacon.

  Nori is simply dried laver. Laver is actually a kind of red algae that turns dark green when dried. The best nori, sushi chefs say, is so dark it’s nearly black. Sheets of nori are so common today that it’s hard to imagine that nori was once a luxury in Japan. Japan alone now produces around seven billion sheets a year. Much of the nori in the United States is produced in China and some of it in Korea.

  But nori started out as a rare commodity. It was precious because harvesters were limited to what they could pull from the rocks at low tide. In the 1600s, people began to cultivate nori on nets in the water, but still yields were low. It was hard to grow because no one could figure out where laver came from. There didn’t seem to be any seeds.

  Through the first half of the twentieth century, laver growers relied on luck. Some harvests were good, some were bad, and nori remained expensive. Sushi rolls weren’t common. Most sushi was nigiri.

  The nori mystery was solved in 1949. The sleuth was not Japanese. It was a pioneering botanist in Britain named Kathleen Drew-Baker.

  One of the first women to graduate from Manchester University, Drew-Baker was fired from her teaching job after marrying a fellow scientist in 1928—married women weren’t allowed to teach. She dedicated her life to the study of seaweed and began collecting samples in old jam jars.

  Drew-Baker gathered tiny, wormlike algae that bored into clamshells and oyster shells and grew them at home on eggshells. She discovered that one of these shell-boring algae was actually not a separate species, but in fact was the “parent” of the seaweed laver.

  It turned out that the large red “leaves” of laver that people eat are basically sex organs designed to produce eggs and sperm—simply an intervening stage in the life of the microscopic shell borers.

  The tiny shell borers send out spores from their hiding places. The spores grow into the red leaves. But the leaves have only half the chromosomes of the tiny parent. Some of the leaves produce clusters of male sex cells and some produce clusters of female cells. The female leaves build little bridges through the water to the male leaves, so the male leaves can fertilize them. If humans did the same thing, men would hide under rocks and ejaculate out sperm, which would grow into flags the size of skyscrapers. Women would do something similar with their eggs. Having sex would involve constructing bridges between the skyscrapers.

  Drew-Baker’s discovery meant that laver farmers in Japan could finally seed their nets instead of relying on luck. Today, nori manufacturing is efficient and predictable. In long rooms a bit like greenhouses, employees sprinkle tiny shell-boring algae from watering cans onto oystershells. The workers hang the shells on ropes in pools and let the algae bore and grow for about five months. After the borers release their spores, the workers wrap nets around big drums and roll the drums in the pools like water wheels. The spores catch on the nets and take root.

  Laver farmers can then freeze the seeded nets and use them later, or they can transport the nets directly to a quiet bay and string them on frames in the seawater. The male and female leaves grow for forty or fifty days, until the harvesters trim them off the nets, shred them into flakes, and dry them so th
at they form sheets. A sheet of nori is basically a nightclub orgy of boy and girl seaweed, pressed into an edible piece of paper. As it happens, the orgy is loaded with glutamate and inosinic acid, or IMP, the delicious double whammy of umami taste that makes both dashi and nori so pleasant to the human palate. Old-fashioned sushi chefs still toast their own sheets of nori, preferably over charcoal, to make them extra crisp.

  Kathleen Drew-Baker died in 1957, unaware that she had single-handedly laid a foundation for Asia’s modern nori industry. In the process, she paved the way for sushi rolls to conquer the West.

  But she was not forgotten. In southern Japan, a group of nori farmers collected donations for the construction of a granite pillar on a wooded promontory overlooking the Ariake Sea, where much of Japan’s nori is grown. On the pillar is a portrait of Kathleen Drew-Baker in bas-relief, with a short English inscription that says “Mother of the Sea.”

  Japanese people still mostly eat nigiri sushi. Without Americans, who are crazy for rolls, the nori business might still be languishing, even decades after Drew-Baker’s discovery.

  “Today,” Zoran said, “I’m going to show you ura-maki”—American-style inside-out rolls.

  Zoran covered his bamboo rolling mat in plastic wrap so it wouldn’t stick to the rice. People often asked Zoran what sushi chefs in Japan had used before wrap. Zoran would laugh because Japanese sushi chefs had never wrapped their rolling mats in anything. Traditionally, they didn’t make inside-out rolls.

  Zoran told the students to watch while he constructed a California roll. He set out half a sheet of nori. He wet his fingers so the rice wouldn’t stick to them, clapped his hands together to knock off any excess water, and spread a fistful of sushi rice across the nori. After a sprinkling of sesame seeds he flipped the pad of rice and seaweed over. The layer of sticky rice remained attached to the seaweed and was now underneath. He tapped his fingers in a line across the center of the nori to create a valley where he would load the filling.