Waking up to breakfast in JapanJeri Quinzio
We arrived in Tokyo and checked into the Asakusa View Hotel. The next morning I walked into the dining room with some trepidation. The room was simple but exquisite, with polished wood floors, traditional shoji screens and a scroll depicting golden koi hanging on a wall. The room looked onto a small, elegant garden where live koi swam in a pool. "They're much too beautiful to eat," I thought, and hoped the chef agreed. I sat-knelt on a silk floor cushion in front of a lacquered tray table, and a graceful kimono-clad waitress began serving a series of dishes and covered bowls, each one more delicate and beautiful than the last, most containing something delicious. In that setting I could have eaten almost anything happily and, with a dozen foods to choose from, I could have avoided the fish easily. But I forgot my morning meal prejudices and tasted everything. In Japan, breakfasts don't differ from other meals the way they do in my house. Most Japanese breakfasts include a bowl of steamed white rice, a small piece of salmon, salmon trout or other fish, a bowl of miso soup with tofu, a vegetable or two, green tea and some tiny pickled plums which can be wonderful or too salty for words, depending on who prepared them. Most lunches and dinners include all of the above and more. A few dishes are unique to breakfast though. There's a rice porridge that tastes as exciting as it sounds. Mixing a little salty fish sauce into it adds flavor, but it's still bland as a bowl of oatmeal. Tofu is prepared dozens of ways in Japan, but only at breakfast did I ever have tofu whey, which has the consistency if not quite as much flavor as scrambled eggs. Eggs are a breakfast food in Japan just as they are here. But they're not served sunny side up. On my first morning, I uncovered a vivid red lacquered bowl and discovered a raw egg inside. Hoping salmonella hadn't found its way to Japan and following the instructions of the waitress, I cracked the egg into its dish, added a little soy sauce and mixed them together with my chopsticks. Then I opened the cellophane package on my tray and took out a strip of nori (dried seaweed). I poured some soy sauce into a tiny rectangular dish and swished the nori through it to soften it a little. Then I poured some of the egg mixture onto my steamed rice and, using my chopsticks, pressed the moistened nori onto the egg-soaked rice and shaped it into a sushi-like roll. It took a few attempts to perfect my rolling technique but eventually I could even press some salmon into the rice and egg mixture before rolling it up. It tasted delicious and it was fun. Another egg dish, a soft savory custard called chawan-mushi, is eaten at breakfast as well as other meals. Served in a tiny covered cup with a demitasse-size spoon, it usually has a single, perfect slice of mushroom or a minuscule fern leaf floating in it. It is so delicately lovely that eating it seems barbaric. A few days later we had a totally different, but equally tasty, breakfast at a small noodle shop. We were served huge, steaming hot bowls of noodles in broth topped with thin slices of pork, chopped scallions and bamboo shoots and accompanied by big cups of robust coffee. By the time we got to Sado Island, home of the famed and fabulous Sado Island drummers, I was an old hand at Japanese breakfasts. So it was quite a surprise when the host at the small inn, or ryokan, we stayed at prepared his version of an American breakfast for us. It consisted of scrambled eggs, instant coffee, sausage that tasted uncannily like canned Vienna sausage (although it was made by a local butcher) and tosuto, soft, thick white bread toasted and slathered with margarine and marmalade. I hadn't had a breakfast like it in years and it was great. He also served salad, in the belief that Americans eat salad for breakfast. And he served miso soup, steamed rice, fish, green tea and pickled plums, just in case we wanted a traditional Japanese breakfast to go with our traditional American breakfast. Wonderful as all my breakfasts were, however, my favorite was the one I ate at a roadside stand outside the mammoth Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. Our group had met in the hotel lobby at five a.m. to be at the market early enough to see the fish auction. Tsukiji is a chaotic mixture of people, trucks, dollies, crates and more fish than you can imagine, all of it so fresh that there's no fishy odor. Tsukiji is fascinating, but it's also wet, cold and vast. And after tramping around for a couple of hours, dodging dollies and 500-pound tunas, we threaded our way through the maze of stalls and headed out, ravenous for breakfast. About a block outside the market, we saw a street vendor. He was making pancakes on a small hot plate, sandwiching them together with some kind of sauce, popping them into waxed paper bags and selling them like, well, hotcakes. We were so hungry and the stream of customers lined up for the pancakes looked so eager and then, as they took their first bites, so satisfied, that we immediately lined up for ours. They cost the equivalent of about $2.00 each. The pancakes themselves tasted like American whole-wheat pancakes. Hot and slightly crisp outside, soft and tender inside. The filling was fabulous -- rich, not too sweet, mellow. A perfect complement to the pancakes. The vendor told our translator it was sweet red bean paste. There were no elegantly lacquered dishes here, no silk cushions, no golden koi. Just piping hot pancake and bean paste sandwiches in waxed paper bags on a cold, damp Tokyo street. It was sublime. As soon as I got home to Boston, I went to a Japanese market and bought a can of sweet red bean paste. I mixed up some basic whole-wheat pancake batter, made the pancakes about four inches in diameter and quite thin, about the size I remembered from Tsukiji. I spread the bean paste over the hot pancakes, sandwiched them together and tasted. One bite and I was transported back to that street corner and one of my most wonderful breakfasts in Japan. Japan National Tourism Organization http://wwwjnto.go.jp Photograph by Jeri Quinzio Copyright Jeri Quinzio |
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TM
Fish and rice for breakfast? I don't even like lox on my bagels. How could I eat fish and rice for breakfast? It was the one thing that worried me about my upcoming trip to Japan. I didn't want to start my days eating what I think of as lunch and dinner foods. I knew I could always order an American breakfast or skip breakfast altogether, but I couldn't think of myself as an adventurous traveler if I did. And I like to think of myself as an adventurous traveler.