Post by Sō Haruko on Dec 13, 2012 2:04:12 GMT -5
_The History and Culture of Japanese Food_, by Naomichi Ishige, is published by Kegan Paul, 2001.
I checked this book out via interlibrary loan, which I'd advise, unless you have a spare $150 lying around to get it from an online retailer. On the bright side, I'm swearing and cursing that I don't have said $150, so, um, that's good, I guess?
This book examines Japanese food and food culture from the Joumon period straight through to modern day, where modern day is essentially the late '90s. Not only does it discuss foodstuffs, it discusses dishware, kitchens, food customs, and menu design (albeit at a surface level for the last).
If you want to know when a particular food entered Japanese cusine, this is a great book to check. For example, even though we consider soy sauce ubiquitous, miso was the soy flavoring most commonly used in our period, starting in the 10th century. Soy sauce doesn't begin to appear regularly until the sixteenth century. Dried fish similar to katsuobushi existed in the Joumon period, but the fish wasn't smoked, becoming what we consider katsuobushi, until the 1670s.
The book takes a thorough look at which parts of traditional Japanese cuisine developed when, and why. It also gets into reasons why other parts of the cuisine never developed, though some things, like why sheep and ducks were never imported, remain a mystery.
I honestly have only two complaints about this book. One is the price tag. (; The other is that although the bibliography is extensive and crammed full of primary sources, footnotes within the text itself are rare. While I can't read Japanese, I would at least like to know which sources the author is drawing on in some cases.
I am also trying very hard to NOT take the book to Kinko's and photocopy the whole thing for later reference. {:
I checked this book out via interlibrary loan, which I'd advise, unless you have a spare $150 lying around to get it from an online retailer. On the bright side, I'm swearing and cursing that I don't have said $150, so, um, that's good, I guess?
This book examines Japanese food and food culture from the Joumon period straight through to modern day, where modern day is essentially the late '90s. Not only does it discuss foodstuffs, it discusses dishware, kitchens, food customs, and menu design (albeit at a surface level for the last).
If you want to know when a particular food entered Japanese cusine, this is a great book to check. For example, even though we consider soy sauce ubiquitous, miso was the soy flavoring most commonly used in our period, starting in the 10th century. Soy sauce doesn't begin to appear regularly until the sixteenth century. Dried fish similar to katsuobushi existed in the Joumon period, but the fish wasn't smoked, becoming what we consider katsuobushi, until the 1670s.
The book takes a thorough look at which parts of traditional Japanese cuisine developed when, and why. It also gets into reasons why other parts of the cuisine never developed, though some things, like why sheep and ducks were never imported, remain a mystery.
I honestly have only two complaints about this book. One is the price tag. (; The other is that although the bibliography is extensive and crammed full of primary sources, footnotes within the text itself are rare. While I can't read Japanese, I would at least like to know which sources the author is drawing on in some cases.
I am also trying very hard to NOT take the book to Kinko's and photocopy the whole thing for later reference. {:
