What precipitated this culinary experiment was a visit by a Mexican student to our home in Tokyo. Among other things, my father was a part-time college lecturer, so my guess is that Maria was one of his students that he invited home during a school break. In any case, while she was at my house, she offered to cook us dishes from her country. Back then, Mexican restaurants did not exist in Japan, even in Tokyo, so what she made for us was terribly exotic. I realize now that she had no access to basic Mexican ingredients, so it would have been impossible for her to faithfully render any of the tasty south-o-the-border treats that we take for granted today in the U.S. My mother closely watched Maria as she cooked, and later tried her own version of Mexican, which was the chili-flavored ground-beef-and-raisin-in-gyoza-wrapper concoction that registered as some sort of foreign-inflected deep-fried mandu in my food memory. What struck me, on top of the olfactory hit from the unfamiliar spicing, was the bright orange of the oil that seeped out of the filling. Garish, I thought, like Maria’s clothing.
This was in the late ‘60s when the global zeitgeist was heavy with experimentation. My mother was the furthest thing from a hippie, but the prevailing spirit may have touched her in some fashion. On her daily grocery shopping excursions she began stopping by a health food store for soy milk. She purchased a pressure cooker to make brown rice and azuki instead of white rice. She began growing a mysterious substance in a glass jar under the kitchen sink that looked like jellyfish—kombucha, as it’s known here today. She started making her own yogurt at home with a temperature- regulated pot. Some of her fancies I welcomed, like the yogurt, but others I remain averse to, to this day, like kombucha.
My mother did not claim to be a cooking enthusiast. It’s just what she had to do most of her life, and she tried to keep boredom at bay by trying new things. When I began attending an American school on the outskirts of Tokyo, she asked me what other kids brought for lunch and what the cafeteria served. Based on my descriptions she began to make her own version of such school lunch staples as sloppy joes, submarines, and grilled cheese sandwiches. For the latter, she purchased a pressed sandwich maker and experimented with various ingredients. The press was a metal clam-shell device that you placed over the gas stove like a jaffle iron. I remember the excitement when she first tried it, of laying down the layers of butter, bread, cheese, ham, tomato inside, clamping it shut, then the anticipation of the browned and melted goodness that would be opened up to us after a few minutes. The best part was the cheese that oozed out from between the bread slices, which formed into a crisp, savory, lacy border that fell off the sandwich to be eaten first like an amuse-bouche.
My mother grew up in a big extended family in a small town near Kobe. She was the oldest daughter of six children and helped cook for a large number of people starting at a young age. Their house sat on top of a hill above the Seto Inland Sea, and she would often be sent down to fetch fish off the boats that came in with their daily catch, bucket and money in hand. The passage of seasons was marked by the type of haul. The arrival of spring meant ikanago (Japanese sand eel). She would follow the fisherman’s calls to the dock, where a boat would be brimming with tiny silver fish still flip-flopping with life. The fisherman would fill her bucket with a shovel and she would lug the heavy burden up the steep hill. At home she would help her mother braise a batch of ikanago with soy sauce, ginger, and mizuame syrup. The resulting tsukudani could be kept for a long time, finding its way into bento boxes and onigiri. The affinity for this dish has been passed down to me and to my family, but sadly ikanago is impossible to find in Boston.
Soon after she married at the age of eighteen, my mother followed her husband back to his native land of Korea, which, at the time, was occupied by Japan. Looking back from today’s Internet-connected world, it’s hard to imagine the culture shock that she must have experienced. In the five years that she spent there, she had to rapidly assimilate a new language, new customs, and a new food culture, all while cast as the lowliest daughter-in-law of a hierarchical Confucionist family, and giving birth to two babies. When World War II ended and Korea was released from its colonial overlord, she was formally absorbed into her mother-in-law's family to avoid anti-Japanese reprisals, and when she finally returned to Japan just before the outbreak of the Korean War, it was on a Korean passport. After that she was classified as a “third country national” in her native land. In later years, she would cackle as she told of being commended on her nearly accent-less Japanese.
Selfishly, though, I'm glad that my mother went through those hard times. Because of those early experiences, we grew up eating expertly rendered home cooking from two disparate and delicious food traditions. Oi kimchi and yukgaejang coexisted harmoniously with narazuke and natto at our dining table. Our palates were formed by the zing of the gochujang and garlic as well as the subtle sweetness of mirin and ichiban dashi.
But back to the experiments. At one point my mother went on a deep frying kick. The bulgogi taco and contemporary stunts like deep-fried cheesecake whisk me back to those greasy times. My favorites along this vein both involved cheese—one was cheese wrapped into cylinders with wonton skin and deep fried; the other was cheese inserted into the hole of a chikuwa (a tube-shaped fish cake), coated with tempura batter, and deep fried. The former was somewhat like the Turkish sigara börek; the latter was unlike anything else I’ve tasted. I can easily see the Cheesekuwa being served with shiso aïoli as a $12 small plate at a trendy “bistro” or “izakaya” today.
When I was a child, eating out at anything fancier than the neighborhood soba or tonkatsu joint was a rare occasion. I do not say rare treat, because frankly I disliked these special events. Inevitably, it meant a visit to Kamiya, an old-school yōshoku (Western cuisine) restaurant in nearby Negishi, with white tablecloth, white napkins, and rigid- backed service. About the only things on the menu I could stomach was consommé and macaroni gratin. In my mother's hands, however, the barely acceptable was turned into my favorite childhood dish, the rice gratin. This was basically the ketchupy rice found in your standard omuraisu (rice omelette) covered with béchamel sauce, topped with panko and grated Parmesan, and baked in the oven. She made this for me whenever my parents had to leave me alone at home for dinner.
Like me, my mother was not a talker. During her final months she rarely complained of the pain from the cancer and preferred to avoid opiates as much as possible. Although she rarely spoke of her late husband, she took to watching Korean soap operas and in her last days would burst out in Korean nonsequiturs while in a dream-like state. At the end I was the last of her children to arrive at her bedside, just as I was the last to be born, and, like in the movies, died the next day as if she had been waiting for me.
I'm not suggesting that my mother would have become a chef if she had been born later in a different place. She was the top student in her high school class and had said she wanted to be a doctor like her oldest brother, but circumstances and the prevailing cultural norms relegated her to being a housewife and helpmeet. She may very well have become a doctor had she been born fifty years later. Cooking was just a creative outlet that was available (read “mandatory”) on a daily basis. But I like to think that even as a modern working mom, she would have put in the extra effort to, at least once in a while, cook up something new and strange for her family.