Matsukaze

Matsukaze

¥970 / box of 10 pieces 

On my first morning in Kyoto and I headed out early enough to see tiny school children delightedly greeting their classmates and elderly joggers charging up miniature Mt. Funaoka. As I wandered east past the Daitokuji complex, I spotted a building across the street with all the classic indicators (weatherbeaten wooden sign, sliding doors, minimalist display window, verdigris lamp) that something inside is both edible and old-fashioned. 

Approaching the window I saw a hanging scroll, a single peony, and a plate with two slices of cake and a hand-painted label. Among the jumble of kanji were two that I could make out: “pine” and “wind.” And just then, through the fabric of my mask, I caught a whiff of something rich, sweet, and a little funky! 

The 250-year-old confectionery Matsuya Tobei is famed for matsukaze (“wind in the pines”) an unusually savory cake made from flour, sugar, malt, white miso, salted soybeans, and sesame seeds. The miso already nudges this moist, dense cake in a distinctly umami direction, but then it’s topped with fermented, salted black soybeans called Daitokuji natto (a “dry” natto, so no slime in sight). As an emotional eater, I am not unfamiliar with the taste of tear-soaked cake, and that’s the closest comparison I can offer. 

Matsukaze is used in autumn for tea ceremony but is very nice with coffee at any time of the year—and thank goodness! As it’s only sold by the box, I had a little more than I could handle and was able to distribute the excess at breakfast at my guest house. People from 5 different countries agreed: matsukaze was unlike any cake they’d ever had before. 

Matsuya Tobei 

Daitokuji Kitaoji, Kita-ku (in front of Daitokuji-mae bus stop) 

075-492-2850

Danpatjuk and Sipjeondaebotang

Danpatjuk and Sipjeondaebotang

The Second Best in Seoul

If you arrive in Seoul feeling cruddy, there’s a silver lining: many must-try Korean delicacies emerged from food-as-medicine traditions. After 15 hours on the plane and 30 feverish hours in bed, I was happy to spend a couple of hours slowly making my way across town to a little cafe called The Second Best in Seoul. 

Founded in 1976, the shop’s original stock-in-trade was the medicinal tea sipjeondaebotang (one website offers the poetic translation, "wholly and dearly protect and preserve everything”), a murky brew of 10 different roots and herbs including peony, milkvetch, angelica, lovage, cinnamon, and licorice. It looked like a mud puddle, tasted slightly abusive, and made me feel noticeably perkier. 

Having taken my medicine, I enjoyed my reward: a helping of danpatjuk, the hearty sweet porridge for which the shop is currently famous. Rather than letting all the ingredients stew together, Second Best assembles each bowl to order; this allows customers to savor the range of flavors and textures contributed by the silky red bean soup, meaty whole red beans, gummy ginkgo nuts, bready chestnuts, and gooey rice cake. 

From the unassuming name to the vintage decor, everything about The Second Best in Seoul is humble, straightforward, and welcoming. The menu also includes ginger and jujube tea, cinnamon punch, and a fermented rice drink. 

The Second Best in Seoul
서울서 둘째로 잘하는 집
122-1 Samcheong-ro
Jongno-gu, Seoul

South Korea

Goshiki-mame

Goshiki-mame 五色豆
Sohonten Funabashi Mamecho Shoten, from ¥270 for 100g

Goshiki-mame, or five-color beans, have been popular Kyoto souvenir since the Taisho era more than a century ago. At the core of each crunchy little pebble is a roasted bean; as with konpeito, the core is repeatedly tumbled in a vat of melted sugar until a substantial candy coating builds up. The colors represent the north, south, east, and west districts of Kyoto, with the fifth color (brown) representing the Imperial Palace. Brown definitely tastes of cinnamon (an appropriately elite flavoring back in the day) and yellow is ginger, but the others…?  

I found these in a little shop next to the Nishijin Textile Center. I was temped by the wooden gift boxes of goshiki-mame and candied sweet potato, but already weighed down by more sweets that I could safely consume. Luckily, they also sell loose mame in smaller quantities from boxes so I got a small handful bundled up in the shop’s wrapping paper.

Sohonten Funabashi Mamecho Shoten 総本家 船橋豆長

396 Tatemonzencho

Kamigyo Ward 

Kyoto 602-8434

Japan

Nab Vam

Nab Vam 
Seattle Center's Hmong New Year, $2

Food is a big component of Hmong New Year or Xyoo Tshiah, the only major holiday observed throughout the Hmong diaspora.  There's pork in several formats, there's a spicy salad of pounded green papaya, there's the chewy confection ncuav, a mochi cousin made from pounded sticky rice.

And there's nab vam, a dessert-drink hybrid so colorful it rivals the appliqued costumes worn by many of the young celebrants.  Although nab vam is often translated as "three color dessert," the variety of textures in each cup is at least as important and often more numerous.  As Sami Scripter and Sheng Vang explain in their excellent Hmong cookbook, Cooking from the Heart, "Westerners are  used to solid and liquid food being separate.  That is not so for the Hmong (and Asians in general), who delight in a variety of slippery, crunchy, chewy, and watery sensations all happening in the same dish.”

Nab vam's textural delights usually include crunchy crushed ice, runny caramel syrup, unctuous coconut cream, slippery strings of rice flour jelly, and bubbly balls of "frog egg" tapioca.  Extras might include crisp water chestnuts, soft-cooked beans, or juicy bits of chopped fruit.  How popular is it?  Scripter and Vang's standard recipe makes 40 servings.    

Xôi Lá Cẩm II

 

 

 

 

 

Xôi Lá Cẩm
Lam's Seafood $1.50

More usually bright purple from the addition of magenta plant leaves, xôi lá cẩm is a sweet-and-savory Vietnamese snack of tinted glutinous rice topped with shredded coconut, toasted sesame seeds, velvety mung bean paste, and salt.  A taco-like format makes this particular variation a little more user-friendly by encasing the extremely sticky steamed rice in an edible rice flour wafer. 

Tet Treats

Banh Kep La Dua (above)
Hue Ky Mi Gia, $1.50

Che Ba Mau (below)
Hue Ky Mi Gia, $3.00

Originally opened in Saigon in 1959, the Hue Ky Mi Gia noodle restaurant now has a massive menu and two Seattle-area locations--but only at a temporary stall at Seattle Center's Tet Festival does Hue Ky Mi Gia dish up these New Year's delicacies.   Banh kep la dua is special waffle that gets its color and aroma from the leaves of the screwpine or pandan plant.  Che ba mau is a drinkable dessert:  iced coconut milk with brown sugar syrup, red beans, and chewy green noodles made from rice flour and--again--that addictive pandan extract. 

Shave Ice

Shave Ice
Shabu Chic, $3

Come summer, communities throughout Asia and the Asian diaspora keep their cool by eating man-made snow piled with with their favorite toppings.  In Hawaii, "shave ice" is drenched in neon-colored syrups, while the Japanese cover their kakigori with stewed fruit, rice dumplings, beans, or green tea, the Chinese eat their baobing snowballs with "eight treasures" such as grass jelly or peanuts, and Filipino halo-halo features bright purple ube and decadent flan.  In almost every case, condensed milk is the favored final touch.  

At Seattle's Little Saigon Fest, restaurant Shabu Chic was offering its own take on the pan-Asian treat:  shaved green tea ice with strawberries, mango, and red beans, glazed with a touch of the ubiquitous condensed milk. 

Bon Odori Kori

Kori
Seattle Bon Odori, $3 

Obon is a Japanese summer-season holiday that sees droves of city-dwellers returning to their hometowns to gather in appreciation of their ancestors; it's a homecoming for both the living and the dead.  The traditional Obon activities range from temple ceremonies to the cleaning of graves to the festive group dances known as Bon Odori.  

In Seattle, Bon Odori takes place in the street outside the Japanese Buddhist Temple.  There are displays, speeches, performances, souvenirs, dozens of dances, and--for those who've worked up an appetite or a sweat--plenty of festival foods.  

On hot days the demand for kori shaved ice cups keeps Temple volunteers on the hop.  The huge blocks of ice (below, left) have to be sawn down to the right size to fit in the ice shaving machine, then the piles of snow are rapidly packed into paper cups (below, right) and decked out with the buyer's choice of syrups (top), condensed milk, or soupy red beans. 

Tofu Pudding Pops

Okay, so let's say you buy too much fresh tofu pudding to eat before it turns into a seething vat of evil. What to do? Hmm...

PUDDING POPS!

Admittedly, they won't make Bill Cosby turn vegan, but tofu pudding pops are pretty good. Matcha above, and vanilla below.

Tofu Pudding

Tofu Pudding
Northwest Tofu Inc.

Seattle's Northwest Tofu makes and sells fresh tofu in a huge range of formats, including jugs of milk, silky blocks, sheets of wrinkled tofu skin, gnarled fried cubes, a salty "Chinese donut", and tubs of soft-set pudding--either plain or lightly sweetened. The pudding is creamy and smooth, but in a much lighter and more refreshing way than dairy-based puddings. The flavor is slightly sweet and slightly beany, but like all plain tofu, tofu pudding is able to soak up other flavors like a new sponge (personally, I think of tofu as "blank" rather than "bland"). Bowl by bowl I enjoyed stirring in new flavorings, with matcha, vanilla, and instant coffee being my favorites so far (did I mention it's a large tub?).

Northwest Tofu Inc.
1913 S Jackson St
Seattle, WA
206/328-8320

Zunda Mochi

Day forty-one: Zunda Mochi

I learned a new Japanese saying recently: Miyagemono ni umai mono nashi, or "Among souvenirs, there are no delicious things". I found this a little hard to get my head around; given the Japanese emphasis on giving souvenirs, packaged delicacies wallpaper every train station and airport; historically, local food souvenirs have been seen as giving the folks at home a way of participating in the journey; and surely, food gifts, no matter how undelicious, gather less dust than a snow globe?

But today gave me a little more insight. I spent most of it backtracking to Tokyo in order to take my ailing computer to the Mac store. Several hours into my train journey (I'm still stuck on local trains) I realized that I had somehow managed not to pack the fresh, delicious and expertly-made sweets that my friends at the Tokinoka Yawargi shop had set aside for me; it was like waking from a dream where you're lolling on a pile of treasure to find yourself in a single bed on IKEA sheets.

Rooting around in my bag, I managed to find a box of souvenir sweets that had been with me since Sendai. On the north end of Japan's main island, Honshu, they make something of a speciality of zunda, young, fresh soybeans that are boiled, sweetened, and ground into mealy paste. Zunda shows up in a number of incarnations, but here it is slathered over tiny balls of mochi.

There's no denying that the package was attractive, sturdy, and a welcome respite from a sweets-free day on the trains. The zunda was bright green on a scale somewhere between hi-lighter and fava, smelled of fresh chlorophyll, and tasted inoffensively sweet. But while the color shouted "freshness", the stiff, gluey texture of both the paste and the mochi whispered "extended shelf-life".

Perhaps the trick to getting delicious souvenirs is not buying foods that are packaged specifically as souvenirs?

Uji Kintoki

Day twenty-five: Uji Kintoki
Kyu-Iwasaki-Tei teahouse, ¥600

The Kyu-Iwasaki-Tei house near Ueno Park is an extravagant cultural mash-up built for a founder of Mitsubishi financial group during the Meiji period. Architect Josiah Condor was born in London in 1852, but lived in Japan from 1877 until his death in 1920. Somewhere he along the way he absorbed the influence of enough other cultures for Persian, Tuscan, Jacobean, and Pennsylvania Dutch elements to be readily identifiable in the house's facade and interiors.

The complex once comprised some 20 buildings on nearly 50000m2, but although the property was designated as a National Cultural Asset in 1952, both the building and the grounds have been ruthlessly pruned. Only three of the original buildings still stand: a detached "Swiss Gothic Cottage" housing the billiards room, the western-style mansion were guests were once received, and butted up against it, a large Japanese-style house where the original family actually lived.

Today a large part of the Japanese house has been given over to a tourist-friendly tearoom (in sparsely-furnished Japanese houses this kind of coversion is a mere matter of giving the tatami mats a good sweep and setting out low tables and cushions). From the limited menu I chose Uji Kintoki, an pile of shaved ice topped with green tea syrup, a dollop of sweetened red beans, and a clutch of white dango dumplings, a perfect energy-booster on a sweltering day.

I placed my order at the register and headed for one of the empty tables at the back when a woman sitting at the prime front table (maximum breeze!) waved me over and insisted that I join her and her husband. He spoke a little English and we all had a grand time muddling through a conversation about my travel plans and the merits of Japanese sweets.

After years of studying the subtleties of ethnographic interviewing, my research technique has devolved to a single question: "So, what is your number-one favorite sweet?"  This lovely even drew me a little sketch of hers, which, sadly, is only available for a few days in early spring.

Amanattō

Day seven: Amanattō / 甘納豆
7-11, ¥120

My mother loves Japan just as much as I do, but we’ve always disagreed on one big thing: the sweets. Like me, she’s a fan of squishy and gelatinous textures, but she’s learned the hard way that a glossy dark brown interior is less often chocolate and more often an, sweet bean jam. “Beans and sugar, “ she says with a shudder.

Well, Mom, avert your eyes. Amanattō is a kind of deconstructed an. A variety of dried beans (including the faddish black soybean) are boiled and then coated in granulated sugar. The resulting product has an appealing crystalline crunch, but the beany interior is somewhat mealy and overwhelmingly sweet, as if a molecular shoehorn had been used to pack in as much sugar as physically possible.

Again, I’ve probably slandered a whole genre by basing my judgment on a 7-11 snack. The amanatto on sale at various depachika are far more expensive, but I’ll hang around looking hungry and see if I can score some samples for comparison’s sake.

Conbini Cakes

Day one: Conbini Cakes

For all the talk about Japan’s historic isolation, most of its sweets have far-flung origins. Baking was one of the technologies (along with firearms) introduced by Portuguese sailors in 1543, and over the following decades it spread like, well, hotcakes. One of the hottest cakes of all was, and still is, a dense eggy brick known as kasutera, based on the Portuguese castella (much more on this later).

Although ovens are still not a standard feature of Japanese homes, baked goods have become a part of daily life. Countless European patisseries ply their wares throughout the country and the Japanese return the favor by frequently nabbing top prizes at the world baking championships with their flaky croissants and flawless millefeuille.

At the other end of the spectrum are the buns and cakes on offer at every neighborhood convenience store, or conbini. The shelves of every 7-11, Lawson’s, and Sankus (“Thanks”) strain with the Twinkie family’s Asian cousins, foamy cakes that are not so much baked as “chemically activated”.

Because conbini are ubiquitous and 24-hour, they are often the first place that travelers taste “real” Japanese food. The first thing I ever ate in Tokyo was a plump pillow of crustless wonder bread filled with a explosive pocket of peanut-flavored goop; it was like a repulsive post-nuclear ravioli. Thankfully, things went better this time around; my first meal was a spongy, semi-sweet “Milk Lemon” cake from 7-11 (not pictured—I was just too hungry). Mercifully it had no hidden goo pockets. For the second course, I had the cake in the photo, a poundcake flavored with matcha (powdered green tea) and studded with azuki beans—perfect jet-lag fuel, and a nice refresher on Japanese flavors and textures.

These fusion treats were very thoughtfully provided by Alice and Drew, the English teachers for whom I am housesitting until mid-August. I’m being supervised by their cats, Nuey and Lala. Pictures of the cats, house, neighborhood, etc, can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/14494106@N04/sets/72157606407285368