Old School Cooking in Tokyo

I found an interesting article posted on the Asahi Shinbun about efforts by some restaurants in Tokyo, along the Sumida River, to revive old recipes from the days of the Edo Period. The dishes mentioned in the article, such as “roasted nebuka negi onions with hot peppered miso”, “eels served with vegetables in piping-hot rice gruel” and “ebi no iridashi” (shrimp deep-fried in sesame oil) are dishes one would not normally associate with Japanese food today, but you can see how they relate. They are in a sense, the ancestors of what people in Japan eat today.

For example, sushi as we know it is somewhat removed from the old finger food fishermen used to eat, according to my old cultural guidebook, and the diets of people living in old Edo city were likewise different than what we think of as Japanese food today. Many of these dishes above use common ingredients we know of now, but in ways and recipes long-forgotten.

Anyway, it’s nice to see restaurants delving into ancient cookbooks and trying to recreate not just recipes, but a way of life long gone. It’s also amusing to see yesterday’s cheap finger-food for fishermen can become highly ritualized and for snobby Japanophiles like myself.