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Quote by Victoria Abbott Riccardi

“The green sponge turned out to be fu (wheat gluten), a high-protein Buddhist staple food often flavored with herbs and spices. The pink-and-yellow cigarette lighters turned out to be yogurts. The lime-green yo-yos were rice taffy cakes bulging with sweet white bean paste. As for the vermilion-colored mollusks, they were a kind of cockle called blood clams (or arc shell) and, according to Tomiko, "delicious as sushi." The jumbo green sprouts came from the daikon radishes and were "tasty in salads." And the pebbly-skinned yellow fruit was yuzu, an aromatic citrus with a lemony pine flavor that was "wonderful in soup.”

Quote by Victoria Abbott Riccardi

Book:Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto
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Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto

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Victoria Abbott Riccardi

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“The tour concluded with our buying the ingredients for shabu-shabu to enjoy that night with Tomiko and her husband. Sitting around the wooden table in Tomiko's kitchen, we drank frosty Kirin beers and munched on edamame, fresh steamed soybeans, nutty and sweet, that we pulled from their salt-flecked pods with our teeth. Then Tomiko set down a platter resplendent with gossamer slices of raw beef, shiitake mushrooms, cauliflower florets, and loamy-tasting chrysanthemum leaves to dip with long forks into a wide ceramic bowl of bubbling primary dashi. I speared a piece of sirloin. "Wave the beef through the broth," instructed Tomiko, "then listen." Everyone fell silent. As the hot dashi bubbled around the ribbon of meat, it really did sound as though it was whispering "shabu-shabu," hence the onomatopoeic name of the dish. I dipped the beef in a sauce of toasted ground sesame and soy and as I chewed, the rich roasted cream mingled with the salty meat juices. "Try this one," urged Tomiko, passing another sauce of soy and sesame oil sharpened with lemony yuzu, grated radish, and hot pepper flakes. I tested it on a puffy cube of warm tofu that Tomiko had retrieved from the dashi with a tiny golden wire basket. The pungent sauce invigorated the custardy bean curd.”

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Book:Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto
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“I've thought at length about stocks and leftovers. How much should I buy? What should I cook? How long should I keep it? I've thought about it and found an answer: do what you would for a large family. With fish: raw on the first day, cooked the next if it hasn't been eaten, made into terrine on the third and soup on the fourth. That's what my grandmother does. That's what most women do and no one's ever died from it. How do I know? It would have been in the paper. With meat it's the same, except I think tartar is a bit vulgar, so I cook my meat the day I buy it, then it becomes meatballs, soft little meatballs with coriander and cumin, celery tops, fronds of chervil, cream, lemon and tomatoes, roasted in garlic. There's no third chance for meat. Well there is and there isn't. I'm not allowed to write about it. With vegetables it's even more straightforward: raw, cooked, puréed, in soup, as stock. It's the same for fruits. Dairy products are such a help: they hold up well. I have a particular weakness for them. I trust them completely. Juices, of every sort, are kept separately in glass jugs. Very important, glass jugs. That's something else I got from my grandmother.”

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“It was a good-sized trout, opened out, salted, pressed, floured and fried. The entrails had been cooked with some vinegar and mint, mashed up and spooned onto the plate as a sort of afterthought. It was delicious: simple and honest. I ate it all, and didn't give a single thought for what it might do to my humors. I sucked every bone, washed it down with some thick, spicy red wine- peasants' wine- from the hills above the town. I knew that I was tasting the place itself: the fish from the river I had crossed on my way into the town, the pig that had rooted in the woods I had ridden through, olives grown a short walk away. The pig had snuffled under the pine trees whose nuts had adorned its sausages. I had eaten the land. The town itself will always be nameless in my memory, but even now I can assemble it from its flavors, because I have never forgotten any of them. A meal of pigs' liver and fish, served with apologies.”

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“All the captain's wives belonged to the literate, well-traveled ranks of the new upper-middle class. Family records say as little about them as such records generally say about women, but one of them - probably Sarah's great-grandmother Mary Furber - left an unsigned diary that the Jewett sisters discovered in the old house when they were well into middle age. Set in Exeter in 1782, it shows us a young woman much like one of Jane Austen's Bennett sisters (the younger, flighty ones), engaged in a ceaseless and rather cold-blooded appraisal of the marriage market. Young men are ruthlessly sorted into two categories, "Somebodies" and "Nobodies.”

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