recommendations: Japanese cookbooks

[coraa]

I'm in search of recommendations for Japanese cookbooks (or food memoirs, or other cuisine-related literature.)

I already have Washoku (a cookbook focused on traditional Japanese home cooking, and one of my favorite cookbooks of any type), Morimoto (a cookbook by the Iron Chef, focused on super-fine-cuisine from a Japanese tradition, not so much the kind of thing you'd make for an everyday dinner), The Manga Cookbook (exactly what it says on the tin), and all the current English-translated volumes of Oishinbo (not a cookbook but a food-culture manga, which I love with a tremendous passion and need to write up one of these days because it's AWESOME).

Indeed, it's Oishinbo that lead me to seek out more writing on Japanese cuisine, because it's not a cookbook. So if you (as I do) want to recreate some of the things eaten in the manga issues, you have to have outside sources to look to. Washoku has been invaluable, but I'd like more!

I don't have a strong preference as to whether the books are cookbooks per se or more general food writing/food memoirs. I'm also interested in all genres of Japanese food, so no particular preferences there. (Well, the food I'm least likely to make at home is sushi/sashimi, but even so a good sushi reference or two would be quite interesting.) Any level of technical proficiency is fine, too: very basic books would be good for teaching me the basics of Japanese cooking (I'm not a novice cook but I am a novice at Japanese food), and more difficult/ambitious books are something to strive for!

I do have a slight preference for books written by Japanese authors. (As long as there's an English translation available.) Second-choice is books written by people who have lived for some time in Japan. (Washoku's author is actually not Japanese, but she is married to a Japanese man and lived in the country for many years.) Books by people who are neither Japanese nor have lived in Japan would come third.

Anyway. Any suggestions?

Comments

[owlectomy]

Harumi Kurihara has a couple that I like very much: Harumi's Japanese Cooking, Harumi's Japanese Home Cooking, Everyday Harumi.

[daedala]

Shizuo Tsuji is the one I think of as standard. Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I have Izakaya: The Japanese Pub Cookbook by Mark Robinson, which is more of a love song to izakaya culture. :) It features eight izakaya, and talks about each pub and its owner, then features around 8-9 recipes from that particular izakaya.

Only cooked a couple so far, but it's still interesting.

While looking it up on Amazon, I found Izakaya Hawaii: Tokkuri Tei Cooking by Hideaki Miyoshi, but I haven't tried it. Judging by the title it's Hawai'ian Japanese cooking, which is a variant on traditional Japanese cooking from what I understand.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Oooooooh. I adore Izakaya food, so that sounds like a winner. Thank you!

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Washoku is so damn awesome.

Oddly enough, the only Japanese food we make at home regularly is sushi. You can totally do sashimi if you have a good Asian market near you, and if you're not doing sashimi, it's actually not very difficult to do many non-fish rolls. Avocado and cucumber rolls, various tempura rolls, and tamago are very achievable even without specialty ingredients and I've never used either a cookbook or a recipe for any of that. Our home sushi is not restaurant quality but handily beats sushi-in-a-box, and many of the main ingredients (rice, mirin, nori, pickled ginger, soy sauce, wasabi) keep essentially forever.

Tamago the way we do it:

1 egg/person eating
soy sauce
mirin
dashi (ours comes in little pellets that you reconstitute in water; it adds umami but is probably not strictly necessary and also should be left out for vegetarians)

Beat eggs very thoroughly. For every two eggs, beat in 1/2 tablespoon soy sauce, 1/4 tablespoon mirin, and 1 teaspoon dashi in water. Adjust to taste (we like ours quite salty and not very sweet). Beat further until very foamy.

Usually tamago is cooked in a square pan, so that you can pour egg into half the pan, wait for it to set, pour egg into the other half, layer the first egg on top of the second, and keep on this way-- you end up with a multi-layered rectangular omelet with sharp corners. We actually own a tamago pan, but honestly you can just trim the eggs. To cook tamago in a regular frying pan, wipe the pan with a few drops of canola or sesame oil and heat on medium-low for a minute or so. Tilt it towards you and pour in a very thin layer of egg, enough to coat the bottom without pooling very much. Once it sets, rotate the pan 180 degrees, tilt it toward you again, pour your second layer of egg, and use a spatula to flip the first layer down on top of the second (get it before the bottom really sets so the whole thing melds together). Keep doing this until you run out of egg, and when the final bottom layer sets get it out of the pan immediately.

Serve chopped into rectangular strips inside rolled sushi, in larger rectangular blocks as nigiri, or shredded in soups and some other dishes. Or just eat it, it's a good omelet.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

You know, that's an excellent point re: raw-fish-free sushi. (I love sushi and sashimi that feature raw fish, but I'm not confident enough in my meticulousness to feel that I'd do anything but screw up a sashimi-grade piece of fish. Although I could practice with some of the less expensive fish, like horse mackerel....) But there's no reason I couldn't make tamago or umeshiso or cucumber or avocado rolls.

And thank you for the tamago recipe. I enjoy it very much at sushi places, and it's one of the boy's very favorite sushi toppings. I bet it'd be good as an element of a ricebowl, too.

[larryhammer]

I have Japanese Country Cookbook by Russ Rudzinski, but I can't say I recommend it. I mean, it's fun and useful and almost entirely focused on washoku, but it's deeply out of print (published in 1969 by a small press that doesn't exist any more).

---L.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Ouch, yes, that does sound a bit hard to get one's hands on! Still, if I see it in a used bookstore, now at least I'll know it's fun and useful. :)

[larryhammer]

Amazon lists a couple dozen used copies, to my amazement. I might snag one my self, given the state of this binding.

---L.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I've had some success with Harumi's Japanese Cooking. Thanks for the Washoku recommendation. This has been on my wishlist for a while, but it's good to hear from someone who's actually checked it out.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the recommendation!

Washoku does call for some ingredients that may not be hugely easy to find (I'm not sure, since we have a local big Asian grocery and even hard to find ingredients are, well, not hard to find), but we have enjoyed every dish we cooked out of it.

[rowr.livejournal.com]

I have also heard from others that Harumi's Japanese Cooking is good, but I have not seen it myself.. I have a little book called 'Bento Boxes' by Naomi Kajima which is a small book with simple recipes but it was what got me started on cooking Japanese dishes, it's more just lunch stuff.

I suggest going to Kinokuniya and checking out their selection - they usually have a fair number of cookbooks in english there. They seem to have a store in Seattle! http://bookweb.kinokuniya.co.jp/ohb/02/contents/storeinfo.html#sea