The mouthwatering scent of boiled bonito broth fills the room — an aroma akin to that which is released from dashi, the simple yet savory culinary cornerstone of Japanese cuisine, and the soup stock responsible for bringing out the umami in our food.
Except, this isn’t a washoku restaurant.
Instead of chefs and wait staff, there’s a group of furrow-browed researchers in white lab coats standing around a steel pot sitting atop a stove. They’re timing how long the liquid in the pan has been bubbling over the fire.
“OK, that’s enough. It’s been 20 minutes and 50 seconds — too long. Now it’s glutinous,” says Minoru Morikawa, who is visiting Tokyo from the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties. “It was smooth until the very end when it suddenly became sticky,” he says with a tinge of disappointment in his voice.
“Let’s repeat the experiment and stop the heat sooner,” says Kazuhide Kaneda, an associate professor at Tokyo Healthcare University.
They are both members of a study group formed by Takayuki Mifune, a leading figure in the rather niche field of reproducing — in minute detail — ancient Japanese meals from 1,300 years ago based on surviving evidence.
A professor at Tokyo Healthcare University, Mifune and his fellow researchers gathered that day at his school’s laboratory to re-create katsuo irori — bonito broth boiled down into a preservable seasoning that was used during the Nara Period (710-94).
It’s a tedious process, involving countless trials as they try to remain as faithful as possible to descriptions in old books and records, as well as using tools that are as similar as possible to the earthenware and other utensils excavated from archaeological sites.
But why invest so much time and effort in reviving long-forgotten dishes? For one, it offers a window into how the Japanese lived and ate over a millennium ago — an investigation into the origins of the Japanese diet nurtured by the archipelago’s climate and abundant natural resources.
To understand Japanese food, Mifune says, is to understand the wisdom and history of the island nation’s inhabitants.
“And when looking at specific ingredients, bonito holds a special place in washoku. That’s why I’m interested in how the ancient Japanese consumed it.”
Culinary time travel
Mifune hasn’t always studied recipes from the past. In fact, the 64-year-old with a quick smile and slightly disheveled mop of hair was once a high school teacher, researching ancient Japanese history during his free time.
He got a gig teaching a weekly class at Meiji University, his alma mater. And when he was in his mid-40s, he left his high school job, received his Ph.D. and started working at Tokyo Healthcare University.
“The university told me to host a seminar, and I wondered what kind of themes students would be interested in,” Mifune says from his office. The nondescript room is full of scents emanating from the various foodstuffs he preserves. In one corner are laboratory incubators storing a container of boiled soybeans and a soy sauce kit, an effort to re-create hishio, a type of fermented seasoning considered an ancestor to miso and shoyu.
“Then, I thought of ancient food.”
One of the students who joined Mifune’s seminar in the first year happened to be from Niigata Prefecture. Mifune knew of mokkan — narrow, long and thin pieces of wood that were used as writing tablets in olden times — that mentioned ayu sweetfish sent from Niigata to Heijo-kyo, the capital of Japan during the Nara Period. Using that as a jumping off point, he and his students decided to figure out how the fish was prepared.
“And that turned out to be really, really fun,” he says. “We ended up writing an article about the subject and submitted it to an academic journal, and it got accepted.”
Since then, Mifune and his students have experimented in reproducing and preparing ancient tsukemono (pickles), sugar, vinegar, abalone and even wild boar meat.
The fascination with what our ancestors used to eat is universal. In October, archaeologists made headlines by uncovering a collection of wine jars dating back 5,000 years inside an Egyptian tomb. Similar discoveries of primitive foods and drinks frequently make the news, offering us rare insights into the culinary lives led by those who inhabited our planet thousands and tens of thousands of years ago.
In Japan, there’s a similar interest in the past. Take the indigenous hunter-gatherers that roamed the nation during the Jomon Period, the earliest culture of prehistoric Japan thought to have lasted roughly between 16,000 years and 3,000 years ago.
Other researchers have been trying to reproduce what the people of Jomon and the subsequent Yayoi Period (generally considered to be from 300 B.C. to 300 A.D.) may have eaten based on the era’s earthenware and tools, as well as animal bones, human excrement and other artifacts.
The problem with going so far back in time, however, is that there are no remaining written records. Therefore, Mifune decided to limit his experimentation to the Asuka Period in the late-sixth and seventh centuries, as well as the Nara and Heian (794-1185) periods for which more written materials are available. And no one else happened to be doing research in that area.
And while there are chefs who create dishes inspired from ancient Japanese culture, these are typically arranged and catered toward modern palates and don’t necessarily reflect the presumed reality of the times.
Mifune applies a method known as experimental archaeology, replicating how food was prepared and eaten using historical documents and historically accurate technologies. Besides the mokkan tablets that have been excavated, one source he turns to frequently is the Engishiki, a collection of texts completed in 927 that compiles the rules and procedures for implementing penal and administrative codes and supplementary laws.
Comprising 50 scrolls, it’s considered an excellent reference concerning all matters related to aristocratic government in the Heian Period due to its extremely detailed provisions. It is in the Engishiki, for example, that bonito appears as a tax item offered to the aristocracy, indicating its high value among the elite.
“In fact, bonito was considered the No. 1 fish when making offerings to the gods,” Mifune says. “And the reason why we’re now focused on the Izu Peninsula is because there have been pot-shaped earthenware discovered from the area that were likely used to boil the fish.”
Origins of washoku
Celebrating the 10th anniversary of washoku’s inclusion in the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list, an exhibition is currently being held at the National Museum of Nature and Science inside Tokyo’s Ueno Park.
It essentially traces the evolution of washoku from the Jomon Period to the present day, focusing on the main ingredients tying together the cuisine: water, rice, vegetables, wild vegetables, mushrooms, seaweeds and seafood. It also chronicles the foreign cultures that influenced the cuisine, including those from China and, much later on, the West.
The basis of washoku, according to the exhibition, began to take shape when wet rice agriculture was introduced to Japan in the late Jomon Period via China’s Yangtze River Delta or the Korean Peninsula and spread during the Yayoi Period. And what would lead to a food culture heavily reliant on rice and fish could be traced to 675 when Emperor Tenmu declared a prohibition on the consumption of meat.
As an alternate source of protein, fish and vegetables such as soybeans and rice were prepared. And in order to compensate for the lack of meat, people began devising new ways of making dashi and creating colorful hospitality dishes that would eventually lead to the invention of traditional food styles including shōjin, honzen and kaiseki.
The history of bonito as a food source, the subject Mifune and his colleagues are currently investigating, also goes back thousands of years, with its bones discovered in Jomon ruins. Old records such as the “Kojiki,” a chronicle of myths and legends explaining the origins of Japan compiled in 712, indicate that the fish, known as katsuo in Japanese, was originally called “kata-uo” (lit., “hard fish”) in a nod to how its meat hardens after being dried.
In the eighth century, bonito products such as kata-uo (dried bonito), ni-kata-uo (hard-dried boiled bonito) and the aforementioned katsuo-irori seasoning were offered to the government as tribute items.
Since the Japanese archipelago stretches more than 3,000 kilometers from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north down to the East China Sea in the south, its flora and fauna, as well as available catch, can vary regionally. When it came to bonito, offerings were primarily made from areas on the Pacific coastline including Tosa (present-day Kochi Prefecture), as well as Izu and Suruga in Shizuoka Prefecture.
The birth of katsuobushi, the omnipresent dried bonito flakes central to dashi made by simmering, smoking and fermenting the fish, is thought to have taken place in the Muromachi Period (1336-1573), flourishing in the Edo Period (1603-1868) when it became a staple of washoku.
“Records show that hard-dried boiled bonito, considered the prototype of modern dried bonito flakes, was being delivered from Suruga and Izu provinces as part of a levy ordinance,” says Motoyuki Yamazaki, a senior researcher at Shizuoka Prefecture’s Fisheries and Marine Technology Research Institute.
Yamazaki is collaborating with Mifune’s study group to reproduce ancient dried bonito products as a way to revitalize Shizuoka’s katsuobushi industry. By checking their shelf life, umami ingredients and salt concentration, he aims to scientifically examine how people ate the products at that time.
“That also means we can learn the history of umami,” he says, referring to the term used to describe the savory, broth-like taste coined in 1908 by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda (1864-1936). Bonito flakes are high in inosinic acid, a component that compounds nucleic acid and is said to provide the umami flavor.
“And dashi, made with bonito flakes, is considered the soul of washoku,” Yamazaki says.
Rice and salt
While washoku is praised worldwide for its subtle, sophisticated taste and health benefits — and while that’s true in its more refined manifestations — this hasn’t always been the case.
When reviewing documents depicting what low-ranking officials tasked with transcribing sutras at Heijo-kyo were eating, Mifune discovered that they consumed copious amounts of rice and salt, so much that he speculates the overeating of carbohydrates saw people suffer from diabetes.
“And Japan is surrounded by water, so naturally fish is abundant, and the only way for ancient Japanese to preserve fish was to pickle it in salt,” Mifune says.
That means many living in that era would have high blood pressure, causing serious life-threatening conditions such as myocardial infarction, cerebral hemorrhage and kidney disease.
“That would lead to a shorter life span,” he says.
The bonito products being re-created at Mifune’s laboratory also feature a high salt concentration, although the debate among the researchers now is shifting toward what was used to transport katsuo irori seasoning from Shizuoka to the capital in Nara.
Morikawa, an expert on ancient earthenware, believes that a vertically long sueki (sue stoneware pottery) unearthed in Shizuoka could have been used. For that theory to be plausible, however, the seasoning would not have been any of the gooey concoctions that have so far turned up in their experiments.
“Back in January, we tried boiling down bonito, including its ara (head and bones), but while that was rich in umami it created a glutinous substance akin to melted chocolate due to the collagen,” he says, referring to the structural protein found in the body’s various connective tissues.
“But this time we didn’t include ara, and that should prevent the liquid from becoming too sticky,” he says. “That would also help prove my hypothesis that these products were delivered from Shizuoka to the capital in ancient times using these pots, giving us further insight on how the people of those times lived and ate.”
At the lab, another attempt is being made at boiling down bonito broth. Morikawa is timing it while others watch intently.
“OK, stop! It’s 18 minutes and 30 seconds,” he says.
The researchers peer inside the pot, and there’s a yellowish, but still fluid, substance accumulated toward the bottom of the pan. A hint of relief can be detected in Morikawa’s voice, as Mifune looks on curiously.
“Interesting,” Mifune says. “We seem to have made some progress.”
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