Rice, Noodle, Fish (37 page)

No small part of that life means picking fruits and vegetables at just the right moment. When the yuzu are so swollen with juice that they begin to drop from the tree, Ben and I head out with a ladder and trash bags, wrapped in a swaddling layer of puffy pants and jackets and thick gloves to protect us from the bastard spikes of the yuzu tree. The harvest isn't quite what Ben expected this season, and he knows his father-in-law will have a few words of pointed advice for him when he finds out.

Life after death for a yuzu is an arduous journey toward reincarnation. At
Flatt's, the juice is preserved with salt and kept throughout the year for vinaigrettes and sauces. The pith becomes marmalade. Even the seeds are salvaged, slowly dried, then mixed with shochu to use as a natural moisturizer.

The star of the yuzu anatomy, though, is the peel, which Ben and Chikako combine with dried chilies and salt and lacto-ferment for two years. The mass is then pureed into
yunamba
, a powerful combination of umami, heat, and a bright citrus uppercut—the kind of insane condiment that, once you taste it, you wonder if you'll ever be able to live without it. The bright red paste finds its way onto tofu at breakfast and sashimi at dinner and into my suitcase to hold me over between trips to Japan.

All told, four products created over the course of two years, a seed-to-skin transformation that yields vital components of the Flatt's pantry.
Mottainai
,
mottainai
.

When there are no fruit to pick, no vegetables to forage, no fish to gut, we load into the Flatts' van and stake out around the peninsula. Even then, fermentation follows us everywhere around Noto. One day we visit the salt flats of Okunoto on the northwest coast of Noto, the longest-running producer on a peninsula long dependent on salt to fuel fermentation. Hiroshi Kikutaro, a sixth-generation salt farmer, still starts with seawater and cooks it down in large wooden buckets. It takes him a week of shoveling and boiling in a small hut where temperatures hover around 130˚F to make a single batch of salt.

At a market in Wajima, a town on the west coast of the peninsula best known for production of some of Japan's shiniest lacquerware, we run into an autumn food festival. Two men in karate outfits with bandannas tied around their heads trade off pounding cooked rice with a massive wooden mallet, working the grain into a fine warm paste that they stuff with sweetened adzuki beans to form mochi, one of Japan's favorite festival foods (every year about a dozen
people die from choking on warm mochi, but the Japanese chew on, undeterred). A food market displays the best of Noto's fermentation muscle, from smoked and sun-dried clams to squid tossed with fermented rice and yuzu peel to those harbingers of a deadly serious food culture, pickled fugu ovaries.

Another day, we travel to Nanao at the base of the peninsula for a beautiful sushi lunch at Kozushi, Ben and Chikako's favorite place to eat on their day off. Walking the street after the feast, we come upon a soy sauce shop in an old merchant home. When we walk in, the smell hits us, and we realize the shop isn't just a shop, but the factory as well. The owner takes us to the back, shows us the soybeans, which have been slowly fermenting in massive wooden barrels since the end of the Meiji period. We all agree that the resulting potion, more sweet and savory than salty, is among the best we've tasted. Chikako buys three liters to take back to the inn.

Closer to home, just a few miles from Flatt's, we find Japan's arguably most important form of fermentation at work: sake. The rice wine production at Tanizumi Sake remains a steadfastly analog operation, best suited to Midori Tsuruno, its sixty-two-year-old owner.

“Even if I make a seven-hundred-kilogram batch, I wash the rice ten kilo-grams at a time,” she says, showing us the washbasin where the sake process begins.

She still uses old wooden buckets for steaming the rice, leaving the steel tanks she bought years ago in a moment of weakness to idle in the corner. “I don't get consistent results with the metal.”

After the rice steams for fifty minutes, it is spread on tables and left to sit for two or three days, which allows for the formation of
koji
bacteria, the invisible hand behind so many of Japan's most important fermented goods: soy sauce, miso, shochu.

The rice is then moved upstairs to the attic for two weeks, where more stable and better bacteria will allow for even fermention. Eventually the cooked rice is combined with water and more
koji
, stored in a bag, and the whole package is placed in a press and squeezed. It rests overnight before undergoing another squeezing. The resulting liquid, fermented for anywhere from twenty-five to forty days, is one of the world's oldest and greatest alcoholic beverages.

Chikako and Ben in the kitchen at Flatt's Inn

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

“I don't like to filter my sake. It takes away the umami flavor.” No doubt: a glass of her milky white potion has just an edge of floral sweetness, with an intense savory kick that leaves your mouth watering. “I'm a small producer, I don't need my sake to always taste the same. I want you to taste the difference from one year to the next.”

One night, with no customers booked for lunch the following day, Ben and Chikako take me to Buranka's, a bar dense with cigarette smoke and karaoke tunes and whisky-soaked barflies. Mama runs the bar on her own, pouring drinks, lighting cigarettes, warming up planks of dried squid over little electric grills that she passes across the bar to her regulars. She has a Marlboro voice box, thick and raspy, but when she takes a break to bless the microphone, everything sounds like sunshine.

Japanese karaoke isn't the twisted spectacle you find in bars in the West. You don't get drunk sorority girls belting out Madonna wildly out of key or packs of Jäger-charged bros imploring you to
don't stop believing
. Instead, participants, mostly older men and women, wait patiently to sing any number of long, crooning ballads with intensity and purpose.

Ben, still an Aussie at heart, tries to open things up with a stirring rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but the locals are unmoved. (They are even less moved by my bare-all version of “La Bamba.”) When Chikako's turn comes up, she chooses a long, slow, moody Japanese song—the type that comes accompanied by a video of two lovers walking over bridges and canoodling on park benches.
She starts slowly but warms up after the first verse, hits the choruses with grace and beauty, and by time the song comes to its dramatic close, the entire bar is staring at her. Though I've understood none of it, I find myself blinking back tears in the thick, squid-scented air of the Noto watering hole.

米 麺 魚

“Excuse me, I must go check on my orange peels, they've been in the oven too long,” says Chikako's mother. We watch as she disappears off the screen. She keeps talking off camera—something about dehydrating techniques that we can't quite make out—and a few minutes later she comes back with a glass jar and a beaming smile. “Would you like to see my marmalade?”

Chikako and Tomiko talk on Skype at least once a week. “I'll call her on the phone with a question and she'll say, ‘Let's get on Skype!' And we'll be there until midnight in the kitchen talking until I tell her I have to go.” These conversations typically take place in the kitchen, often with both women in the midst of a seasonal project. Chikako sets her iPad up on the counter, and the two go to work.

As they talk today, Chikako cleans her way through a bucket of
haka haka
, tiny silver fish Ben brought back from the morning market, removing the heads and guts from a thousand little fish in preparation for another long ferment. They talk about life, about Tomo and Emily, Ben and Chikako's kids, but mostly they talk about food—the new experiments, the bottles in the basement, the tiny pieces that hold this whole world together.

You won't find many women in the professional kitchens of Japan. The traditional structure for a family-owned restaurant involves the father running the kitchen, the mother controlling service, and son and daughter—if involved—divided along the same lines. Deep-rooted domestic roles and the odd backward belief arguably make the gender division here worse than you'd find in other parts of the world; some believe, for instance, that women shouldn't make sushi because fluctuations in their body temperature would compromise the fish. There are, of course, women working hard to dissolve these divisions in restaurant kitchens across the country, but it's mostly men you find slicing fugu, boiling soba, battering vegetables, and working the grills, griddles, and stovetops of Japan.

The entrance to Flatt's Inn

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

But behind closed doors, women are the ones who feed this country. More than domestic cooks, they are the guardians of secrets, keepers of the culinary flame, the ones who work silently to safeguard Japan's remarkable food culture. At the heart of this preservation is the mother-daughter relationship.

When Chikako tells me her first batch of marmalade was a mess, her mother is quick to explain why. “That's because you didn't use enough pectin,” says Tomiko.

“She's right, so I turned it into miso instead.”

Mom is never far away. Tomiko and Toshihiro still spend plenty of time at their old inn, and when they come, Chikako and Ben know that their progress will be tested. Mom and Dad lift the lids, probe the fish, squeeze the daikon, smell the
ishiri
, test the vinegar, taste the
yunamba
, inspect the garden. “It's intense. They run us ragged,” says Chikako. They always find problems—room for improvement, let's say—and they try their best to provide guidance without outstaying their welcome.

Tomiko and Toshihiro are quick to point out how grateful they are that Chikako and Ben have made every effort to keep their vision alive. Beyond the bounty in the basement, they organize springtime picnics and an annual autumn beer garden, they gather with other local inn owners to trade recipes and industry tales, they help government officials promote the area. This is a fragile moment for the cuisine of Noto, and the couple does everything they can to share a way of life with people
who may not have benefited from parents as exacting as Tomiko and Toshihiro.

Running the business and helping in the community would be more than enough for even a highly functioning couple to handle alone, but the real work takes place outside, around the garden, on the docks, in the forest—all around them. There are ferns growing down by the river: they must be picked. Seaweed has started to wash up along the shore below the bluff: time to lay it out for drying. Mushrooms cling to logs, begging to be plucked and dried: it's time. The squid needs salting, the fruit needs fermenting. The moment is now.

There is a subtle sense of urgency to these tasks, because when Mom passes, so too does the great store of knowledge she has accumulated over the years. There is no book, no repository of culinary know-how; no recipe would ever suffice. There are only the seasons, and those who have lived through them.

“We don't have that much outside exposure in Noto,” says Tomiko. “You learn about food from your mom, and if Mom's not a good cook, you probably won't be either.”

“My father knew that the flavors that he was tasting weren't the same as the childhood flavors,” says Chikako, “and he wanted to return to those.”

“We didn't want to lose those old flavors,” says Tomiko. “We never went to the store. We weren't just making dashi, we were making the ingredients for dashi. We dried the kombu, we made the
katsuobushi
ourselves.”

“For my mom and my grandma, it was never about saving certain techniques, it was just what they did,” Chikako says. “But now we really are losing these traditions. To keep it alive means producing it yourself.”

“Nature is very generous here, so there is much to do,” says Tomiko. “But only people who know about this through experience know what to do with these products.”