Rice, Noodle, Fish (34 page)

(Matt Goulding)

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

 

Yakitori at its best is an elegant exploration of the totality of one animal. For the full chicken experience, work your way past the white meat and into the wondrous tastes and textures of parts unknown.

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

(Matt Goulding)

せぎも
SEGIMO (sweetbreads)

(Matt Goulding)

肝
KIMO (liver)

(Matt Goulding)

揚げ物
CHOCHIN (uterus)

(Matt Goulding)

鶏肉
TORINIKU (breast)

(Matt Goulding)

はつ
HATSU (heart)

(Matt Goulding)

卵
UZURA TAMAGO (quail egg)

(Matt Goulding)

ぼんじり
BONJIRI (tail)

(Matt Goulding)

つくね
TSUKUNE (meatball)

 

 

For the better part of thirty years, Toshihiro and Tomiko Funashita were the king and queen of fermentation in Noto. And since Noto is often regarded as the Kingdom of Fermentation throughout Japan, it could be argued that their skills held dominion across the country. Of course, they would never say it themselves, but Toshiro was recognized by the governor for his smooth, umami-rich fish sauce, and Tomiko was widely accepted as Noto's chief authority on all manners of preserved flora and fauna.

Noto is a peninsula on the coast of western Honshu, a craggy appendage of Ishikawa Prefecture that juts thirty kilometers out into the Sea of Japan. It is a place defined not just by the harshness of its seasons but by the generosity of its geography: rivers and mountains, ocean and valleys, one flowing into the next to create an extraordinary tapestry of ecosystems.

In some ways Noto is a perfect reflection of life in rural Japan: a quiet, self-sufficient tableau of Shinto and Buddhist traditions, where the rhythm of life is so directly tied to the rhythm of the seasons that calendars are beside the point. In other ways Noto remains a place like no other, a beautiful, lonely seascape, a world of distinct
environments condensed into a tiny space, where everything is filtered through the lens of food, and the culture of fermentation runs so deep that nearly every meal has been transformed by time and bacteria.

The Jomon, the original settlers of Japan, first came to Noto over two thousand years ago, establishing a hunter-gatherer subsistence and ushering in a culture of food preservation that carries on today. They built large earthen-ware pots—believed to be among the first use of pottery ever by humans—and began to harvest salt. Together they had the tools to ferment fish, vegetables, rice—whatever they needed to survive the long cold months when the land produces little.

Today's Noto looks scarcely different from the Noto of the Jomon. Rice paddies climb the hillsides in wet, verdant staircases, dense woodlands trade space with geometric farmscapes, tiny Shinto shrines sprout like mushrooms in Noto forests. Villages seem to materialize from nowhere—wedged into valleys, perched atop hills, finessed into coastal corners. Pull over, climb out of your car, breathe deep for a taste of the finest air that will ever enter your lungs: green as a high mountain, salty and sweet, with just a whisper of decay in the finish.

Noto gained its reputation as the Kingdom of Fermentation because of this air. For most of its history, Noto was cut off from the rest of Japan, forced into a subsistence model that in many ways endures today. That was possible not only because of the bounty of Noto's fertile environment of trees, grasslands, fresh water, and sea, but because the air is rich with humidity that encourages the growth of healthy bacteria, the building blocks of fermentation.

Toshihiro Funashita's family lived in the interior of Noto, his father a forester, his mother a homemaker and a cook of wide reputation, the one responsible for organizing the elaborate feasts behind their community's most important social events—the highest charge in
the local cooking communities of rural Japan.

Like any great and good country, Japan has a culture of gathering—weddings, holidays, seasonal celebrations—with food at the core. In the fall, harvest celebrations mark the changing of the guard with roasted chestnuts, sweet potatoes, and skewers of grilled ginkgo nuts. As the cherry blossoms bloom, festive picnics called
hanami
usher in the spring with elaborate spreads of miso salmon, mountain vegetables, colorful bento, and fresh mochi turned pink with
sakura
petals.

Funerals, in particular, are a time to eat in Noto, and the preparations that surround the passing of a loved one may involve days of work and dozens of participants. As a Shinto ceremony, funerals in Noto are vegetarian affairs, prompting local women to bring to the table the best of the products from their respective gardens and pantries. Toshihiro's mother, as respected in the kitchen as she was in the community, was in charge of overseeing the cooking at funerals in her town, which meant deciding the best way to make use of the gathered ingredients and organizing the women into teams to turn out elaborate spreads of boiled and fried vegetables, tofu dishes, and vinegar pickles.

When mudslides forced Toshihiro's family off their property, they relocated to the Noto coast and eventually opened an inn on 249, the two-lane highway that winds its way around the perimeter of the peninsula. Sannami was a
ryokan
, a traditional Japanese guesthouse, complete with tatami-floored rooms, a wood-fired bath, and full dinner and breakfast service for guests.

During those years, Toshihiro met and eventually married Tomiko Futamata, a young woman from the town of Notocho. He was an electrician who would go on to be a programmer in the infant days of the Japanese computer industry. Tomiko was a librarian, guardian of Noto knowledge, a voracious reader with a busy mind. She lost her mother at an early age, but she spent hours in the kitchen with her mother-in-law, learning how to transform a momentary surplus into a year's worth of good eating.

The dining room in Flatt's Inn, with a generous view of Toyama Bay

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

For most of Noto history, men weren't allowed in the kitchen. The kitchen was considered a sacred place for women, and having a man enter was tantamount to an invasion of privacy. But Toshihiro was different from most Noto men: he was deeply curious about food, about the tastes of Noto that defined his childhood, and as he watched his parents feed travelers from around Japan, he began to imagine what he would do differently.

米 麺 魚

Fermentation is the art of controlled decay. In fermentation's most basic form, enzymes produced by molds, yeasts, and bacteria break down organic matter, converting macronutrients like sugar to alcohol and proteins to amino acids. But there is a fine line between fermentation and decomposition: initiate and control microbial activity carefully, and you've extended an ingredient's life indefinitely; take it too far, and you've lost it forever.

There are many forms of fermentation, but the two most common in the food world are lactic acid fermentation, produced by fungi and bacteria and used to produce most varieties of pickles and fermented condiments, and alcoholic fermentation, induced with yeast, and used to produce the world's supply of adult beverages.

Fermentation is one of man's earliest culinary innovations, stretching back nine thousand years to the Neolithic period, when civilizations in modern-day China turned rice and fruit into alcohol. Since then, you'd be hard-pressed to find a single successful civilization that didn't have fermentation as a core component of its food culture.

Without it ever crossing our minds, most of us consume fermented foods at various points throughout the day: coffee and yogurt for breakfast, wine and cheese for dinner, chocolate for dessert. No small number of man's greatest
achievements—from the hams of Spain to the beers of Belgium to the dark, bitter chocolates of Venezuela—are the byproduct of carefully controlled enzymatic breakdown.

The natural coalition of fermentation-loving cultures forms a strange Venn diagram: Russians and northern Europeans use salt to stretch vegetables long into the winter; West Africans ferment cassava root as a means of neutralizing its natural cyanides; southern Asians build entire cuisines around the flavors produced by dead fish; and Bolivians in the high Andes employ the enzymes in human saliva to transform chewed corn into fermented beer.

Most of these cultures have a handful of fermented products in their pantry, but in Japan the entire cuisine turns around lactic acid and alcoholic fermentation. The grocery list of fermented staples runs long and strong: soy sauce, miso, sake, mirin,
yuzukosho
,
katsuobushi
,
natto
, rice vinegar,
tsukemono
: without fermentation, the Japanese kitchen would be a lonely place. It's no coincidence that Japanese food places such a premium on umami, since umami is one of the primary byproducts of the fermentation process.

Beyond the basic advantage of preservation, fermentation offers a host of other benefits to consumers: a surge in B vitamins, the introduction of friendly gut bacteria into our systems, and of course the deepening of flavor and aroma in everyday ingredients.

In recent years, in certain corners of the food world, fermentation has become the fascination of chefs, hipsters, and DIYers, but what goes down in Noto has nothing to do with a young chef geeking out over a lacto-fermented heirloom carrot or a crunchy commune denizen making kombucha in the bathtub; this is a lifestyle necessity emblazoned in the DNA of this peninsula.

米 麺 魚

Toshihiro's parents retired in 1982, and Toshihiro and his wife took over
running Sannami. They were ready for this moment: Tomiko's career as a librarian gave her ample time to digest every last piece of text dedicated to the topic of Noto food, and Toshihiro's limber mind and unwavering drive made him the perfect person to refine some of the more challenging culinary practices at hand. Soon after assuming ownership of Sannami, they began to slowly transform the inn into a living encyclopedia of Noto food traditions.

The
shokeba
is the most important room in the Noto home. As small as a closet or as large as a bedroom, this is where a family stores their stock of fermented goods: purple jars of
umeboshi
, pots of mocha-colored miso, barrels holding batches of homemade soy sauce. Like most local families, Toshihiro's parents kept a well-stocked
shokeba
, but the basic staples of the Noto kitchen were reserved for family consumption. At the hotel, they focused their efforts on serving a broader menu of Japanese food. To serve Noto food, products of necessity and distinct local character, to their guests would have been an embarrassment.

But Toshihiro and Tomiko had a different vision. Tomiko made it her business to put every piece of knowledge she had into practice, quickly turning the
shokeba
into an edible calendar of the Noto bounty. In the summer she harvested seaweed, picked plums, turned a rich garden harvest into a rainbow of preserved produce. In the winter she dried persimmons, pickled fish beneath the weight of stone slabs, fermented soybeans into dark batches of miso.

Toshihiro put his efforts into realizing the vision he'd shaped during years of watching his mother at work. His idea was driven by the tastes of his childhood, tastes that he feared Noto was losing, tastes that he felt he and his wife could restore and carry forward. He shaped himself into an expert on seafood, turning out beautiful, precise plates of sashimi and local fish dishes for
his guests. Above all, he dedicated himself to
ishiri
, Noto's ancient fish sauce.

The history of fish sauce is the history of the world's greatest powers: the Byzantines, the Greeks, and the Romans all produced
garum
, made by salting and sun-drying fish blood and guts and extracting and filtering the resulting liquid. Civilizations across the Asian continent developed different takes on salt-fermented fish sauce, from Vietnam's nuoc mam to Korea's
aekjeot
. Even English Worcestershire sauce, based on a formula of fermented anchovies, is a form of fish sauce. Whether all of these cultures understood the science of umami is doubtful, but it's clear humans have known the simple secret of fish sauce for thousands of years: it's nature's greatest force multiplier, a few drops enough to intensify the flavor of anything it touches.