Ichi Ju San Sai: Japanese Cooking in North Carolina
Issue No. 6: Food, Nutrition, and Access in Our Communities
Words - Kaori Sueyoshi
Photography - Sayoko Sueyoshi
Despite having lived in the U.S. for over half their lives, my parents continue to eat a nearly complete Japanese diet, thanks to the remarkably precise cooking methods of my mother. Though I’ve inquired often throughout my life, it remains a mystery to me how she manages to create complex and authentically Japanese recipes in the heart of North Carolina. The other morning I ate a manjū—a steamed red bean cake—and it dawned on me that the nearest location where I could purchase the same treat must be hundreds of miles away.
Using ingredients she sources from a complex web of Asian grocery stores and local supermarkets, she builds dishes in ways that feel like magic to me. We’ve had our fair share of failed attempts at mother-daughter cooking lessons. My unsteady hand carefully measures vinegars and oils, per my mom’s instructions. Then, with the churn of a wooden spoon or quick work of elongated chopsticks, the meal magically materializes, and I’ve failed to learn a single fucking thing. It always goes like this.
Once, in a trick, to find out her secrets, I filled a notebook with illustrations of my childhood favorites (her gyoza, cream puffs, Japanese-style croquettes) and left a blank space next to each drawing for her to jot down the recipe. The spaces remain blank.
When my parents first moved to North Carolina in 1992, there were few Asian Americans and there were maybe one or two Asian grocery stores in a sixty-mile radius. I asked my mom recently about the little Asian market that used to be in our town; is it still around? She wasn’t sure, since so many larger, new ones had opened in the past decade. She recalled that the owner of that little market, Silver Wok, was a Taiwanese woman married to an American man. He was a musician who taught lessons at a local piano shop. I wonder how my mom came to know all of that.
Before moving to the U.S, my mom studied nutrition and taught home economics. She also worked in a lab in Japan, where she met my nerdy and whip-smart dad. She used to tell me all the vitamins I could be getting if I just ate the meals I’d pout and poke at (I was a shitty little picky eater). Recently, she explained to me how unlike white beans, red beans peel faster if you pour icy cold water over them right after they’re boiled. This practice is called “bikkuri-mizu”, or “surprise water”; the beans get surprised and pop off their shells.
Sometimes, my mom laments how she isn’t nearly as educated as my sister and I are. Sometimes, when I’m drunk, I tell her it would take me two lifetimes to learn to do what she does daily.
I interviewed her at the kitchen table. I requested we cook a Japanese meal together using ingredients found at a typical American supermarket. As we cooked, she rattled off what she knew about the nutritional value in each dish.
Sayoko, my sister, came by afterwards for a little photoshoot for the meal and the treasured ingredients.
Interview:
Kaori: How did you manage to cook “healthy” for the family, when “healthy” looks so different in America? You studied nutrition in Japan with Japanese ingredients. Was it ever a struggle to cook “nutritiously” here?
Chizuko: It wasn’t that tough. The basics are the same. Concepts like cooking vegetables with fats in order to better absorb their nutritional value—those apply here or there. Also, I did study other cuisines—Chinese, European.
Kaori: Any concepts of nutrition that you find mistaken or strange here?
Chizuko: Energy bars. And “fat-free.” “Fat-free” items don’t catch on in Japan; the typical Japanese diet isn’t very high in fat anyway. You’ll see milk cartons with “fat-free” in tiny font; if anything, people are looking for higher fat content in milk to indicate higher quality. What people seem to miss here is that variety is the key. Cuisine in the U.S. can be so low in variety. “Health” is thought of as a giant salad. I’d rather boil some fresh vegetables down into a smaller, more consumable portion, and get the same amount of nutrition. Then pair with dishes.
There’s a concept, 一汁三菜 (ichi ju san sai), which translates to one soup, three dishes (fish, seasoned dish, stewed dish.) This is what you learn in Japan as the “ideal meal.”
But, some diet/nutrition fads have been the same. Eggs were made the enemy for a while in Japan, too. So was cholesterol.
Kaori: I want to know more about your experiments in finding the “right” ingredients. Can you think of a case where it went wrong? Where did it go well?
Chizuko: [long pause] Oh, fish. Buying fresh fish. I choose them by the eye—clear eyes usually mean they’re fresh. But when I came home one time, your dad noticed they had these little beards, and those beards usually mean they’re bottom feeders. That’s alright for flounder type fish but for others… it’s a disappointment. I remember I just randomly cooked those fish into random dishes.
Also, when we first moved here, I couldn’t find adzuki beans (for red bean paste), so I gave an attempt with pinto beans. That wasn’t great.
A time it went well? Oh, when I figured out how to make shiro-an (white bean paste). I found out I can use large lima beans. The shells came off easily and it worked! It takes a long time, though. I tested with other white beans in the dry beans section. Lima worked best. You don’t find large white lima beans in Japan. That’s not how shiro-an is made there. I hadn’t even tried to make shiro-an in Japan, actually, since you can buy it pre-made. I had to learn to make it here since I couldn’t find it and wanted to eat it.
Kaori: Before the Internet, how did you find out where to get these ingredients?
Chizuko: I’d get in contact with Japanese people who lived here longer than us, who were here before us. They’d know where you can find Asian-type ingredients. Then I’d look up the stores on a map and go.
Kaori: Moving here, were you ever worried you’d lose access to the foods you loved?
Chizuko: Not so much. I’d heard there’d at least be rice. And supermarkets were fun at first—meat was so cheap! I was eating a lot of gummy bears.
There was a year when around 20 Japanese families were going to arrive around the same time to North Carolina. They were employees of a Japanese company, temporarily relocating to the U.S. branch. The company reached out to interview me and two other moms about how to live here. I’m not entirely sure how they found me. The people interviewing, they had so many questions: What do your kids take to school for lunch? How do you cook? The other kids won’t find it weird if you pack onigiri for your kid?
I just answered that it wasn’t a big deal.
Kaori: Why do you continue to cook so thoroughly Japanese?
Chizuko: Because that’s what tastes good? It’s what my body wants.
Here’s what we cooked:
Miso Soup (味噌汁)
Nutritional Information:
Fermented beans (soy in miso) have ingredients like lactose, which are good for your immunity.
Protein (depending on what you put in)—for us, it was tofu.
Plus the nutrition of veggies
Ingredients:
Miso
Vegetables (whatever you’d like—we used potato, carrots, onion, green onion)
Tofu
Soup base—we used chicken instead of dashi (fish broth that’s normally used for soups) to stick to our theme of ‘ingredients easily accessible in an American grocery store’
Instructions:
Dice up your vegetables and tofu.
Then, dice up the chicken. Rationale for cutting veggies first: the clean up is easier.
Heat some sesame oil in a pot.
Toss in chicken, cook partially.
Throw in veggies, cook for a few more minutes.
Cover with room temperature water.
Bring to boil.
Mix in miso (use a spoon and chopsticks, mix in slowly).
Add tofu last.
Grilled Salmon (鮭の幽庵焼き)
Nutritional Information:
Protein
Fish oil
Ingredients:
Salmon, skin on
Mirin
Cooking rice wine
Soy sauce
Sesame oil
Instructions:
Slice salmon.
Mix one part rice wine, soy sauce, and mirin (make enough to cover the amount of salmon).
To marinate: place it all in a plastic bag. Flip the bag over a few times while marinating.
Let it marinate for at least an hour.
Then, on a heated frying pan (in Japan we’d normally use a fish grill):
Add sesame oil.
Place salmon on pan, meat side first, skin side after.
Grill until cooked through.
Spinach w/ Sesame Seeds (ホウレン草の胡麻和え)
Nutritional Information:
Vitamin A - the vitamin A of leafy greens is absorbed into your body with greater ease when cooked with some sort of fat/oil (in this case, the fats from the sesame).
Keratin
Ingredients:
Spinach
Light brown sugar
Sesame seeds (ground, if possible)
Soy sauce
Instructions:
Bring water to a boil and place spinach in, stems first.
Even though the entire process to boil spinach will only take a few minutes, the stems take the longest, and the water is the hottest at the point of placing the colder spinach in the pot.
After a few minutes, drain the spinach. Use your hands to squeeze out excess liquid. It’ll have shrunken to a much smaller size than before you boiled.
Mix one part light brown sugar, one part sesame seeds, and add soy sauce to taste as savory as you’d like.
Pickled Cucumber (Sueyoshi Style) (キューリの漬物)
Nutritional Information:
Vitamin C from the cucumber
Ingredients:
Cucumber
Soy sauce
Rice vinegar
White sugar
Instructions:
Slice cucumber.
Mix two parts soy sauce, one part vinegar, one part sugar.
Place cucumber in a plastic bag with sauces. Let marinate for however long (minimum one hour).
The other two require special techniques/equipment, so we’ll just list out the ingredients:
Ginger Rice (生姜ご飯)
Nutritional Information:
Ginger warms your body.
Instructions:
In the rice cooker, mix:
Rice (we mixed brown and white)
Mirin
Chinese cooking wine
Salt
Water
Japanese Omelette (卵焼き)
Nutritional Information:
Protein
Ingredients:
Egg
Sugar
Salt
