The Story of Sushi (16 page)

The students practiced searing albacore on skewers over the kitchen burners. Zoran glanced at the clock and pulled the salted mackerel from the refrigerator.

The fillets were beautiful. Everyone gathered around and admired them. They glistened silver and blue with dark wavy stripes against the old-fashioned bamboo colanders. The room suddenly belonged to a nineteenth-century Japanese fish monger instead of a twenty-first-century American sushi school.

The students laid their mackerel fillets into a stainless-steel pan. They poured in rice vinegar to begin the process of marination.

“Take a ten-minute break,” Zoran said. “Then, sashimi.”

T
he Japanese tradition of eating fresh raw fish has nothing to do with sushi. Sushi began as a way of preserving old fish, and street vendors turned it into a crude snack food.

Centuries earlier, the Japanese nobility were already feasting on elegant meals that included slices of fresh raw meat called sashimi. Sashimi didn’t have to be fish. It could be anything, even the meat of deer, wild boar, or birds.

In ancient China, people ate thin slices of raw meat or fish drizzled with a misolike dressing. The practice continued into the twentieth century in southern China, until the Communist government outlawed it to prevent illness from parasitic worms. In Korea, beef and fish sashimi are still popular, often served with spicy red pepper paste and vinegar.

The Japanese probably learned to eat raw meat from their Chinese and Korean neighbors. The Japanese called the dish
namasu,
a term that appears in Japanese texts from 1,200 years ago.
Namasu
was a sort of raw-meat salad. The chef sliced the meat into long strips, then tossed it with a dressing that might contain ginger paste or the crushed leaves of a pungent herb called water pepper, as well as miso and dashi.

Probably beginning around 800 years ago, people began to use the word
sashimi
as well as
namasu
.
Sashi
means “to stick or pierce,”
and
mi
means “meat.” There are two theories about the origin of the word
sashimi
.

One is that the chef would “stick” a fin from the fish among the slices as a decoration that indicated the type of fish. The other is that
sashi
was a euphemism for
kiri,
“to cut.” In the culture of the samurai, calling the meal
kirimi
—sliced meat—would have raised unpleasant connotations of sword fighting and human bloodshed. In medieval Japan, human bloodshed was the last thing anyone wanted to think about when they sat down for a nice meal.

The habit of eating sashimi with a side dish of soy sauce instead of dressing probably originated after 1600, when the new shogun moved the capital to Edo. Today, chefs serve sashimi not just with soy sauce but also with a dab of wasabi. They also serve it with a garnish, which usually consists of a mound of shredded white radish.

Zoran handed out chunks of giant Japanese radish and bellowed, “
Katsura-muki!
” It was time to practice the dreaded “column peel.”

Kate gritted her teeth and held the chunk of radish and her vegetable knife up to her face. Then, breaking her grandmother’s cardinal rule, she sliced toward herself. She carved off a nice, thin sheet of radish.

If customers who ate sashimi had any idea of the work that went into preparing the garnish alone, they would never leave the shreds of radish on their plate. In fact, chefs serve radish with sashimi for a good reason, and it is meant to be eaten. The same chemicals that give radish its spicy taste also help inhibit the growth of harmful bacteria.

Zoran spun his radish chunk and shaved it into long, paper-thin pieces, like ribbons of silk. He folded each sheet twice lengthwise, curled the fingers of his left hand, and pressed his hand down on the folds. His right hand chopped in a blur, the cleaver thudding fast. Fine slivers of radish piled up in the wake of the blade.

The room fell silent as the students tried to imitate Zoran. The sharp smell of radish rose from the table. The students’ strips were chunky and their cutting action slow and deliberate. Zoran’s body jiggled rhythmically back and forth, his cleaver thudding away at
high speed. Suddenly, into the silence burst Zoran’s voice, with a song.

“When you’re happy and you know it,
katsura-muki
!”

Silence fell again, but for the staccato thuds of cleavers hitting wood. When Zoran had finished he watched the students.

“Stop!” he shouted. “Everyone has been watching too much
Iron Chef
French! Your conception of
thin
is completely different from mine. Are any of you aware of how thick your slices are? Are any of you doing anything to correct it? Are we going to have to stop and go back and do thin vegetable slicing every day instead of fish?” Zoran looked menacing. “Because I will!”

The students bent back over their work. It took them each half an hour to slice and chop one 4-inch chunk of radish into garnish.

Zoran set up his cutting board with a slab of albacore tuna, a variety of decorative plates, his radish shreds, and a stack of bright green perilla leaves. Called
shiso
in Japanese, perilla is a lemony, Chinese member of the mint family. Like radish, perilla leaf is thought to have medicinal properties, including an inhibitory effect on bacteria. It is healthful and meant to be eaten, too.

“Okay,” Zoran said, “first, you need to make sure you have a clean plate, and you need to make sure it’s not hot out of the dishwasher. You don’t want your plate to cook the fish!”

Zoran chose a round china plate with a wide blue pattern around the rim. He squeezed a handful of shredded radish onto the plate, like a pyramid of cotton candy. After all the work that had gone into it, now he covered it with a sloping leaf of perilla.

Zoran leaned over his cutting board and traced six fluid arcs through the albacore with his knife. Using his steel chef’s chopsticks and the fingers of his left hand, Zoran lifted four pieces and laid them on an angle against the leaf. He set the other two directly on the plate, at a contrasting angle, slightly staggered. He slipped a lemon wedge behind them to one side, spooned a dollop of bright orange onion and carrot sauce in the crook between the two sets of slices, topped the left side of the sauce with a tiny pyramid of
chopped green onion, and pressed a wad of wasabi in the lower right corner of the plate.

Nothing was symmetrical. Everything was off center. Yet Zoran’s platter was a masterpiece of balance and captured motion. In less than sixty seconds he’d created a landscape of blooming shrubs, climbing forests, ranging mountains, and a beaming sun, surrounded by a deep blue lake, all within the confines of a 10-inch plate.

In a sense, making sushi and sashimi has much in common with creating a Zen garden. On the grounds of a Buddhist temple, a monk snips away at the trees and shrubs until they have been reduced to abstract symbols evoking nature’s beauty in miniature. A sushi chef snips away at fish, reducing them to abstract morsels of the sea. Zoran, the gruff Australian air force veteran, was a Zen gardener in disguise. The students stared in awe at the plate.

Unlike sushi, sashimi should always be eaten with chopsticks. Takumi and one of the other students whispered to one another. They were both left-handed. Zoran had placed his slices in the direction that a right-handed customer would approach with chopsticks. That was the easiest way for him to arrange them, and the easiest way for a right-handed customer to pick them up. To achieve that, a left-handed chef had to think backwards. Unless, of course, the customer was also left-handed. The best sushi chefs consider this, and reverse their arrangements if the customer appears to be left-handed.

At the end of class, only one sashimi arrangement had captured the elusive Japanese aesthetic. Takumi, like Zoran, had succeeded in building a miniature Zen garden out of garnishes and fish.

T
he following morning Kate armed herself with a new weapon. After handling mackerel the day before, she’d gone home with itching hands. Today she’d arrived with a pair of latex gloves.

Mackerel belong to the genus of fish called
Scomber,
and they are responsible for an ailment called scombroid poisoning, which is one of the reasons they have a reputation for spoiling quickly. If mackerel aren’t properly chilled, bacteria that are otherwise harmless can grow and release toxins. One of those toxins is histamine, which generates the symptoms of an allergic reaction. Contact with histamine had probably caused Kate’s itching hands. Scombroid poisoning can occur with mackerel’s bigger cousins, the tuna, and is thought to be one of the most common forms of seafood-based food poisoning in the United States.

“Okay, now get your
saba
out,” Zoran said. “
Saba
for breakfast! Oh, boy.”

More mackerel. Kate pulled on her latex gloves like a surgeon. The fillets from yesterday, salted and marinated, were ready to use.

First, Zoran demonstrated how to remove the stomach lining and ribs from the lower corner of each fillet. He felt with the pads of his fingers along the center line and plucked out bones with special tweezers. Then he flipped the fillet over so that the mackerel’s skin was showing.

“This is a
hikari mono,
” Zoran said. “That means ‘shiny-skinned fish.’”

Sushi chefs divide all fish into three basic categories: red, white, and blue.

Red
is a narrow category, and tuna is the primary member. Swordfish also qualifies. Unlike most fish, these fish have blood-red meat.

White
includes fish with pale flesh, including sea bream, snapper, flounder, and sea bass. Most fish in the ocean have pale, colorless flesh.

Blue
refers to fish that have silvery-blue skin, such as mackerel. Blue includes fish that sushi chefs in Japan serve frequently but that Westerners encounter less often, such as gizzard shad, horse mackerel, and halfbeak. Because the skin of these fish is silvery, sushi chefs also call them
hikari mono,
or “shiny things.”

Sushi chefs began categorizing fish by color and shine in the early 1900s. Historians think that geishas in Tokyo’s entertainment district may have been the first to popularize these categories by using them when dining with their clients. In Tokyo today, young people use a variation of the term “shiny fish” as a form of slang. They refer to girls who wear glitter and shiny clothes as “mackerel gals” because they look like shiny-skinned fish. In fact, mackerel have a reputation the world over for their ostentatious shine. In England, calling a man a “mackerel” meant he was a dandy; in France, it meant he was a pimp. It is from the latter usage that we get the term “mack daddy.”

“Now,” Zoran told the students, “you want to keep the shine on.”

What really distinguishes blue, or shiny, fish at the sushi bar from other categories of fish is that the chef serves them with the attractive surface of the fish still attached to the meat, as part of the presentation. Mackerel can have reddish flesh, but they don’t qualify as red because chefs serve them with their shiny scales still attached. Conversely, many large fish—tuna, yellowtail—also have shiny blueish skin, but they don’t qualify as
hikari mono
because their skin and scales are too tough to eat.

Fish with small scales can swim faster because they create less drag in the water. In relation to body size, tuna have relatively small scales. In relation to body size, so do mackerel. Mackerel are much smaller fish, though, so their scales are tiny. They feel velvety to the touch and people ingest them without realizing it.

However, on mackerel, the scales lie underneath a layer of transparent protective skin that
is
too tough to eat. The sushi chef must remove the outer skin without removing the scales. It is one of the trickiest tasks in all of sushi making. It’s like trying to remove a sticker from a wall without damaging the paint.

While the students watched, Zoran tugged horizontally on a corner of the outer skin at the head end of his fillet. A layer of transparent film rolled slowly off the fillet, leaving behind the luminescent blue and silver colors on the surface.

Zoran flipped the fillet over, tilted his knife, and cut a slice off the tail end. When he turned the slice right side up, it retained an attractive, silvery-blue slanted edge, the hallmark of carefully prepared shiny-skinned fish.

That slice was for
nigiri
. Next, he cut nine slices straight down through the fillet for sashimi. He constructed a sashimi platter, another Zen landscape on a plate.

The students hunched over their fillets and extracted bones along the flesh side. Certain fish, including mackerel, salmon, trout, and herring, are especially problematic to prepare because their muscles contain floating pin bones that are unattached to the main skeleton. Bone pulling itself is a challenge. Soon the students’ fillets were pocked with craters.

When Kate finished pulling bones, she tried to grasp the edge of the skin on her fillet. But with her latex gloves she couldn’t get a grip. And she’d started from the tail. Zoran was watching. “Try from the other end,” he said.

She flipped it around. She got a grip and tugged. She pulled a little too steeply and too fast. The shine and color all came off with the skin.

She sighed in frustration. She peered at the other students.
None of them were doing much better. Even the ones whose sushi usually looked perfect had created fillets that were ragged and colorless. Mackerel was hard.

Kate admired the clean, asymmetric lines of Zoran’s sashimi arrangement.
That’s
what she wanted to make. She cut her fillet and pushed the slices around on a plate, but couldn’t replicate it. Kate had a good artistic sense, but the Zen-like beauty eluded her.

Zoran appeared at Kate’s side and arranged her sashimi for her.

Zoran slipped back to his station. He had another trick up his sleeve—a small wooden box. He lined the bottom of the box with translucent strips of simmered white kelp. He pressed in a fillet of mackerel, then stopped himself.

“I’ve got to think in reverse,” he said. He rearranged the mackerel, so the shiny skin faced down. Then he packed rice on top.

Zoran looked up at the class. “This is how sushi originated in Japan,” he announced. The students stopped working and gathered around. “Before they pressed sushi by hand,” Zoran said, “they pressed it in a box. It’s called
hako-zushi
”—box sushi. This was a small-scale variation on the method of pressing fish and rice in a box with heavy stones.

Zoran inserted the top of the box—or rather, the bottom—and pressed down hard. He flipped the box and lifted it off. The kelp had created a transparent glaze over the patterned colors of the mackerel. He sliced it into bite-size pieces. In parts of western Japan, around the old capital of Kyoto, this style of pressed box sushi is still considered “normal” sushi, as opposed to the Tokyo-style sushi that has colonized the rest of Japan and the world.

The students dispersed back to their stations. The other woman in the class took a bite of her mackerel, chewed it thoughtfully, then spit it into the trash. The student next to her yelped.

“Ugh!” he said. “That’s the sixth time you’ve done that!”

She shrugged. “I can’t eat anything raw. I’m pregnant.”

She offered her mackerel sashimi to Kate. “Do you want to take this home?”

“Not a good idea,” Kate said. “Mackerel is making me nauseous and itchy.”

At the end of class, Zoran reminded them, “You will have another test in two days.”

Kate looked up.

“The test will include a special roll for each individual,” Zoran said. “Each of you will have to come up with your own. Something creative.”

Soon a vision popped into Kate’s head. Love hearts.