Food
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Cooking Tsukemono (Pickled Vegetables)
In a food culture where making and consuming pickled vegetables (called tsukemono in Japanese) have become a deeply ingrained way of life, people have come up with creative and practical ideas to consume these foods without waste. Tsukemono is designed to be salted and picked for many months, and as time passes, it becomes too salty and sour for consumption. The Hida region residents over the years have developed ingenious ways to make this otherwise inedible food into a tasty side dish. One of the most popular is the “nitakumoji”.
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Leftover Cuisine
During the cold and long winters of Hida, keeping warm in any way possible has been a part of life. This includes how to cook leftovers. Generally the Hida people will not eat anything cold during the winter months. So what happens when a family has left-overs from dinner? Usually, it makes sense to warm it up using a microwave, but the people of Hida would bring out their personal teppan (steel pan), oil it, and cook leftovers on it.
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Fermented Sushi
The Hida area, due to its heavy snowfall, cold long winters, and relatively isolated location in the middle of the mountains, historically had been a very self-sufficient society with deep knowledge and experience on preserving foods. Other than salting, drying, and canning, one of the most common ways to preserve food in Japan is fermentation.
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The Art of Dried Fruits
Golden rice fields, farmers harvesting crops, and the smell of mushrooms from the nearby mountains are some of the standard changes that signal the coming of autumn in Japan. However, there is one particular practice in rural Japan where the Japanese particularly feel and sense autumn. This is the practice of preparing the “hoshi-gaki”, or dried persimmons. (“Hoshi” = dry and “gaki” = “kaki” = persimmons)
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Onsen Cooking
Japan is a resourceful country with seemingly little natural resources to power the country. However, a closer look into how people lived in the past reveals a different story. Geothermal energy was used to warm the body via the onsen, and have been used in the onsen areas for cooking. Onsen cooking can still be seen in various onsen towns throughout Japan. Depending on the temperature, the food is steamed or boiled.
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Freeze Dried Daikon
Most of us are accustomed to seeing dried fruits, but in the Yamanomura area, dried daikon roots or “kanboshi-daikon” are made every winter as non-perishable food items to support the food stock until the next harvest season around June. “Kan” means cold, “boshi” means dried, so “Kanboshi-daikon” means freeze dried daikon.
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Natural Compost Plates
Houba is a leaf from a type of native Magnolia tree grown in the alpine region of the Hida region. (“Hou” = Magnolia Tree + “Ba” = leaf in Japanese) This leaf is used throughout the region from the spring through autumn as plates, cooking pans, and equivalent of plastic wraps.
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Great Food with a Sad History
Some foods evolve through history and show the ingenuity and resilience of people during tough times. Tonchan, a dish that looks like something between a BBQ and a hot pot involving beef intestines (and other internal organs), vegetables, and a mix of various spices, is one of those foods that developed through a difficult time in history.
