The story of Sonoko Sakai’s life is perhaps best told by starting at the family kitchen table in her childhood home in Queens, New York.
“Butter on rice was such a thing,” says Sakai, 69, the first American-born child of her Japanese parents. “My mother grew up post-war, and there was hunger. Coming to America from Japan, there were eggs and cream, and she felt so lucky to have a giant refrigerator to put it all in. It was like a dream come true.”
From that unique background comes Sakai’s fourth cookbook, “Wafu Cooking: Everyday Recipes with Japanese Style.” The book contains several instant classic recipes, from traditional Japanese fare with a twist (as in the Miso-Honey Butter on Toasted Onigiri [riceballs]) to Western home cooking with added depth (as in the Shiokōji [cooked rice inoculated with Aspergillus oryzae mold] Marinated Roast Chicken). Most dishes in the book are quick, usually not taking longer than 30 minutes, and the pages are adorned with cute illustrations by collaborator Juliette Bellocq and mouthwatering photos by Rick Poon. My one wish was for a picture of her mother’s lasagna, enriched with a blend of Western and wafū (Japanese style) flavors, but the space where it should be is empty.
“My mother passed away during the pandemic, and I didn’t get to go back to Japan to look for an old picture,” Sakai says, explaining how leaving the recipe without a photo feels like homage to her memory. “She was very generous in the kitchen, and that’s where my love of cooking started.”
Much of Sakai’s culinary influence comes from the rare set of circumstances that allowed her to live abroad while staying in touch with her Japanese roots. Due to her father’s job as an executive for Japan Airlines (JAL), work had taken the family abroad just a few years after World War II drew to a close — first to the United States but later Mexico.
“In the early ’50s, he was (among) the very first generation of JAL employees when the company started,” Sakai says. “He was sent to New York and was working in Rockefeller Center.”
By 1986, Sakai found herself a graduate film student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Encouraged by the faculty she often cooked for, she published her first cookbook, “The Poetical Pursuit of Food: Japanese Recipes for American Cooks,” a collection of recipes inspired by her grandmother’s kitchen in Kamakura but adapted for American diners.
After graduation, Sakai became a creative buyer for Japanese movie distributors, later progressing to producer. However, after the 2009 economic crash that decimated the independent film industry, she decided to pivot away from movies. One of the first steps she took during this new chapter in her life was to teach soba-making classes.
“Through it all, I had cultivated an eye for a good story and also developed a taste for good food,” she says. “I was trying to find myself again and stand on my own two feet. It’s funny — noodle-making really helped me.”
While Japan has long had a healthy respect for high-quality buckwheat that forms the backbone of soba noodles, America was not quite the same.
“When I started teaching soba here, people thought buckwheat was only good for manure,” Sakai says. “Farmers would just till it over and push it under before it even bloomed. It didn’t get any respect.”
When the east coast heritage grain movement began in the 1990s, Sakai was out in California, giving out seeds to anyone she could. She was an important voice in the Tehachapi Grain Project, which aims to propagate heirloom grains in the region, and in addition to a home in Los Angeles, she and her husband, multidisciplinary artist Katsuhisa Sakai, have a house in the high mountains of Tehachapi to the north of the city.
Sakai’s fourth cookbook, “Wafu Cooking” comes at a time when fusion cooking retains little of the stigma it did during earlier decades. Back then, Sakai says, there was not as much interest in a book on Japanese home cooking in the ’80s, a time when cross-cultural cooking had a bad rap.
“‘Fusion only caused confusion,’ they said, but I feel like it has been 25 years or more since then and I think we have come a long way,” she says. “We are cooking with what is in our pantry in even more clever ways.”
No wonder “Wafu Cooking” resonates so strongly with my own style of cooking: my own comfort foods, just enriched by the Japanese pantry.
“The fermented ingredients that I highlight in the first part of the book — miso, mirin, sake, shoyu and the likes of shiokōji — are versatile seasonings we can use in Western cooking without even making it a big deal. Nowadays, it’s like salt and pepper, olive oil, ketchup or mayonnaise. I think that we have become so global that people don’t even think we’re doing something foreign or alien.”
All that coalesces into Sakai’s view that incorporating Japanese ingredients or techniques into your everyday recipes should feel as natural as reaching for your favorite condiment.
“I call it ‘wafuing,’ and people are doing it without even knowing it,” she says. “It is just part of the way that we cook today, using these ingredients from all over the world and especially from Japan.”
That said, Sakai is careful to note that it can be overdone.
“Just keep in mind that the word ‘wa’ is the word for harmony. It is gentle. It is the way we approach everything. You don’t want to impose something if you’re going to break the harmony of the dish.”
Key to this concept — that cooking with a wafū mindset is more than just cooking like a Japanese chef — is kakushi aji (literally, “hidden flavor”), the addition of an ingredient or seasoning that might be too subtle to taste distinctly but elevates the dish overall.
“I think kakushi aji is a supporting actor,” Sakai says. “It is like dashi, as a little something in there, but what we elevate more than anything else is the natural flavor of foods and you don’t want to mask it. I wanted to get this word kakushi aji out into the world.”
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