Driving Audhumla

Captured by the Kacho

He showed up at my hotel in Ginza 15 minutes early, beating me at my own game of conspicuous punctuality. After the de rigeur bowing and exchanging of business cards, we headed to a taxi, the first one I'd encountered in Japan since my arrival in Tokyo two days earlier.

The cab had lace antimacassars on the seat backs, and the driver was clad in a business suit and immaculate white gloves. He pressed a button on the dashboard and the door to the cab swung open automatically.

Our destination was Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, the busiest transportation hub in the world. We were to catch a train that would take us away from Tokyo, at a time of day when most of the station's 3.5 million daily users were arriving there on their way to work in the city.

I've been six feet tall since shortly after my 13^th birthday, so I am easily a head taller than most Japanese people. So as we pushed forward into the station, I was like a salmon trying to swim upstream against a shoulder-height river of black satiny hair rushing past me.

I was with a kacho, which is a mid-level manager, from a Japanese conglomerate. He was a PR Kacho, taking me to view his company's vineyards in Yamanashi ken (county) on the back side of Mt. Fuji. Aim of the trip was for me to interview the winemaker for a story I was writing about the Japanese wine industry.

Kachos occupy an interesting position in Japanese companies, they aren't often highly compensated, and are expected to work unrelentingly long hours. They are beginning to have a fair level of autonomy in their careers, in return for their loyalty to the company and their lockstep seniority.

Dining out at fancy restaurants is a rare luxury for most Japanese. But when a kacho  has the responsibility to entertain a foreign visitor, one of the big perquisites of the job is the ability to use the company's expense account, often to visit restaurants that would be otherwise unaffordable or even unattainable, in terms of access.

I can't remember this particular kacho's name so let's just call him Watanabe-san, Watanabe's being one of the most common surnames in Japan. He was solicitous, and I think anxious that I might come away with a bad impression of Japan in general and his company in particular.

The train trip to the vineyard took a couple of hours, winding through snow-covered hills (this was in January). We had to change trains at one rural station, and I remember standing on the platform looking out at a snow-covered persimmon tree on which the bright orange fruit stood out as sharply as Christmas tree balls.

When we finally got to the vineyard, it was impressive. Viticultural methoods were a little different from what I had seen back in the U.S., with some accommodations made to a higher propensity for mold in Japan's more humid climate. The leaves were gone, but they had left some bunched of grapes hanging on the vines, with an open  white sheet of paper carefully placed at the top of the bunch.Watanabe-san explained that this was to keep mold from migrating from the leaves to the fruit.

Even though it  was a chilly January day, we had lunch at a table set up out in the vineyard, looking out over rolling vine-covered hills to that perfect cone of Mt. Fuji. I was eager to see what the winery chef would decide to serve, and was somewhat taken back when the meal proved to be a bowl of beef stew, probably the very last thing I expected to eat there. But the stew was piping hot, so, while it was a surprise, it was just right for such a day.

I don't remember much about the wines except that they weren't much to my taste. They were made with unfamiliar grape varieties, mainly Koshu -- a white wine grape -- and Muscat Bailey A, which produces a light red wine. The grape varieties had been chosen for their ability to tolerate long freezing winters, and the humid region's propensity for mold, and those are not necessarily the qualities that make great wine.

Once we got on the train heading back to Tokyo, Watanabe-san started asking me what kind of food I liked and where I wanted to go for dinner. I hadn't expected that dinner was part of the experience, but, to be polite said that would be lovely and anything would do.

He kelp pressing me for more details, so finally I just said ``Nihon ryori,'' which means Japanese cuisine, figuring I'd get a chance to have some really good sushi in the land from whence it comes.

We had to stop to change trains again, and this time the station was full of school girls, all clad in the middy-blouse and skirt uniform that is standard at most Japanese schools. Clearly they didn’t see foreigners that often up close and personal, particularly a very tall western woman traveling alone, so they stared and stared as they gulped quick bowls of noodles.

Our train came but once we were about 10 minutes out of the station, it stopped. The conductor kept making announcements to explain the situation. I knew just enough Japanese to be befuddled by what he was saying, as he kept using the word ``tako,'' which I knew was the Japanese word for octopus. I could not figure out why an octopus would have anything to do with a train stalled in the foothills near Mt. Fuji.

Finally Watanabe-san explained that ``tako'' is also the word for kite, and that a kite had gotten tangled in the overhead wires and shorted them out. The train, of course, was electric.

So we sat for some hours, as darkness fell and it began to get colder and colder. Finally the line was repaired and, several hours later, we drew into Tokyo's Shinjuku station. Watanabe-san parked me on a bench in the vast station and headed over to a pay phone to make several animated phone calls. This was, of course, in the days before everyone was carrying around cell phones.

Finally satisfied, Watanabe-san came over to collect me and the two of us got into another taxi that had been summoned through one of the phone calls. We drove for about 20 minutes and finally stopped in front of an unimpressive doorway, behind which a flight of stairs was visible.

Watanabe-san said we had arrived at the restaurant and seemed to be excited and eager to ascend the stairs. I don't know what I expected, perhaps something with tatami mats and low tables.

Instead, we were met by a waiter wearing black knee breeches, black stockings, black shoes with large silver buckles, and a white shirt with billowing sleeves, rather like a pirate might wear.

He ushered us into the dining room which had heavy dark wood tables and wing-back chairs upholstered in a dark floral design. The walls had dark wood wainscoting running up to a chair rail, with a floral wallpaper above. Prints of 18^th century sailing ships framed in dark wood hung on the walls.

The table was set with heavy white linen, and had candles in silver candlesticks. Each place setting had an army of silver cutlery arranged in perfect geometric order extending in each side from the silver charger.

The waited handed us menus, which were written only in Japanese. So I asked Watanabe-san to order for me. A lengthy consultation with the waiter ensued, and finally he went off to turn in our orders. He returned with large glasses of the wine we had tasted earlier in the day up in the vineyard, so I assumed that this restaurant must have been one of the winery's customers.

Eventually our food came. Watanabe-san had ordered the same meal for both of us. It came in lidded silver porringers with pierced-work handles at one side.

 I lifted the lid and what did I find? More beef stew. Certainly exquisite beef stew, with each piece of carrot and potato meticulously cut to the exact same size. The beef was beyond tender, although I really hope they hadn't used that incredibly pricey Kobe beef for such a mundane dish as stew.

I was mystified by the food. This didn't look like any Japanese food I had ever eaten before, and the restaurant certainly had no elements of décor I would have recognized as Japanese. Then I took a look at Watanabe-san's face. He was, as one might say, in hog heaven. He was thrilled at the meal, and was eating each bite with great relish.  

Watanabe-san's English was not terribly nuanced, so it took a while for me to craft a question for him that, I thought, wouldn't be too impolite. I wanted to ask him why in the world we were eating beef stew when I'd told him I liked Japanese food.

Although Watanabe-san got an embarrassed look on his face after hearing my question, he quickly insisted that this really truly was Japanese cuisine.  I gestured to the waiter in his knee breeches and to the sailing-ship prints on the wall and asked Watanabe-san, ``Nihon ryori honto?'' (Really Japanese food?) Again he insisted that this was true Japanese cooking.  

So then I asked him what kind of Japanese food this was. His reply came quickly: ``Oranda ryori.'' Oranda? I'd never heard of a region in Japan known as Oranda. In fact, the only time I'd ever heard that word was in connection with a kind of long-tailed goldfish.

What in the world could Oranda be? Then I remembered that Japanese has a lot of loan words from English and other European languages. So what sounds like Oranda in English?  Oranda, Oranda?

Then all of a sudden I got it. Oranda . . . Holland. This had to have been  Dutch-inspired Japanese food.

 The Dutch came to Japan in the early 17^th century, and after they sided with the Tokugawa Shogunate in crushing a rebellion by Catholic Christian Japanese, they were the only European nation permitted to remain in Japan.

They were given the former Portuguese trade concession on Dejima Island in the Nagasaki harbor, and for the next century provided Japan's only window to European science and technology. The Dutch left their mark on Japan, including a number of loan words that became Japanized, such as ``biru,'' which came from the Dutch word for beer (bier), ``garasu'' for window glass (glas), ``renzu'' for lens, and ``dansu'' for dance (dans).

And apparently they left some of their cuisine behind, including beef stew. After I returned from Japan, I did a little reading about Dutch cooking and discovered that ``hachee'' is a popular beef stew containing carrots and potatoes, onions, and a little vinegar. I'm pretty sure that's what we had that night.

Watanabe-san had never been to this restaurant before, and it seemed that a beef stew was a big treat for him. Plus, in a restaurant with high tables and chairs, plates and silverware, he didn't have to worry about embarrassing issues relating to meals with foreigners such as whether I could sit on the floor and eat with chopsticks (of course I can), or would find raw fish to be too yucky (which I definitely do not).

After dinner Watanabe-san was eager to take me to a bar, also on the corporate nickel, but it had been a long day, and, besides, I wasn't that eager to go to some little hole in the wall, as most Japanese bars are, and sip his company's very expensive whisky for hours, as is the prevailing practice.

He seemed disappointed, realizing that his ride on the winery's expense account was ending for the night. He summoned another cab, which took me back to my hotel, and after a few more rounds of bowing and a declaration of undying friendship, he finally left and I headed back to my room.

For Watanabe-san, this meal was a very big deal. For me, with two big bowls of beef stew in one day in Japan, of all places, it was something else. Not bad, of course, but certainly not what I expected, or hoped to find. Who could ever have dreamed of going to Japan to eat beef stew, much less what was undoubtedly an incredibly expensive beef stew?     

What can you do with a big shiny purple vegetable?

One summer when I lived in New Orleans, I stuck a few eggplant seedlings into the ground, never expecting very much would come of my efforts. Certainly in the Pacific Northwest, I'd never seen anyone grow eggplant successfully, and somehow got the notion that they were rare and difficult to grow.

I hadn't factored in Louisiana's rich delta soil, or the long hot summers characteristic of that region. It seemed as if less than two months later, I was bringing laundry baskets full of football-sized eggplant to work in efforts to share the bounty.

I don't come from eggplant-eating people. In fact all the members of that Solanaceae family are rare ingredients in Nordic cuisine. We had tomatoes in our salads of course, and maybe an occasional green pepper, but the vegetables more common to our way of cooking and eating are the root vegetables and brassicas, both of which do well in short, cool growing seasons.

But for some reason, my mother made a dynamite ratatouille. When I stop and think about it, I wonder where she ever learned that such a dish existed, much less acquired a recipe. Certainly I never saw any food containing an eggplant when I stayed with my maternal grandmother on the ranch in Ellensburg.

In the early autumn, sometimes when I walked into the kitchen after school, I could smell something magical. I'd open the oven door, lift the lid on the brown crockery bean pot, and there it would be, ratatouille in all its glory, bubbling away. It was a glorious mixture of eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, onions and garlic, simply layered in the pot, with only added salt and pepper. (Olive oil, a staple ratatouille ingredient, was unknown in my house. In fact, in my first years of cooking on my own, I had some major cooking disasters based on my mistaken assumption that olive oil was the juice one poured off a can of olives).

I used to sneak some of the still-cooking ratatouille into a cereal bowl  just because I couldn't wait until dinner time.  And once I figured out the role of olive oil, it became one of my favorite dishes to cook.  It doesn't really take a recipe, in my opinion, as it's a seat-of-the-pants approach, depending on what's available. Certainly great tasting ripe tomatoes add a great deal, but I've even made pretty great ratatoulle with almost marble-hard cherry tomatoes. Many people use summer squash, too, but I find if you add too much, it can make your ratatouille awfully runny.

I like to use the big Black Magic eggplants, but any of the half dozen either kinds I've found in local farmers' markets work just as well. Eggplants come in a wide range of colors and shapes, with some of them the white or green skinned and as small as an egg. It's more work to peel lots of small eggplants, and my preference is for peeled eggplant in ratatouille.

If you're here in the Bay Area and looking for unusual eggplant varieties, check out the Old Oakland Farmers Market, which operates on Friday mornings beginning at 8 a.m. You will see more varieties of eggplants  (and other unusual produce) than you ever dreamed possible. But get there early as the best  stuff goes quickly. 

Did you see the great Disney animated film ``Ratatouille''? Here's the recipe Disney created. It includes tomato sauce, which I never use, and a lot more summer squash (probably for the color effect) than I like. But hey, it's endorsed by the Mouse Kingdom.

However, here's a link to a recipe using unpeeled eggplant that I conjured up a few years ago for my friend Mark's Seasonal Chef website. You insert slices of tomato into slits cut into halved eggplant, cover with chopped celery,  onion and garlic and once it's baked, you have a ratatouille-like effect.

Caponata is another favorite dish made with eggplant. I learned my version from the Time Life Foods of the World series published back in the 1970s, but a zillion other very good recipes abound.  I've served it hot as a vegetable side dish, and cold as an element of an antipasto. It's also very good spread on some excellent toasted French bread.

Some people don't like capers very much, but for me, that are an essential element in caponata. And yes, as is the case with this recipe from Williams-Sonoma, you do add raisins and sugar. Caponata is a Sicilian dish, and sugar and dried fruit are sometimes seen in recipes from that region.

And then there's the Turkish take on the baked eggplant genre. It's called Imam Bayildi (which means ``the imam fainted,'' supposedly because he was horrified at how much costly olive oil his wife used to prepare the dish). It's a great dish to make when you have an abundance of eggplants, as each person gets a half eggplant that is stuffed with onions, garlic, parsley and, of course, tomatoes.  This particular version calls for half a cup of olive oil and don't stint. Besides, as the Mayo Clinic says, olive oil is good for you (all those monounsaturated fatty acids).

You can make your fainting imam dish either on top of the stove or bake it in the oven. I'm of the oven persuasion but your mileage may vary. Here's a pretty good recipe that gives you both options.

As you may have figured out by now, eggplant and olive oil go together like milk and cookies. Eggplant likes to soak up as much olive oil as you will give it. Eggplant Parmesan takes full advantage of this vegetable's affinity for olive oil. Most recipes, including this one,  involve slicing the vegetable crosswise into inch-thick slabs, breading and frying them, and then placing them in a baking dish in layers, alternating with a good marinara sauce,  and Parmesan and Mozzarella cheese. 

In India and Thailand, eggplant is frequently used in curry dishes, sometimes in combinations with other vegetable such as green beans. There are a lot of pretty complicated eggplant curry recipes to be found on the web, but this Thai version  has the virtue of simplicity, and it can be cooked fast enough for a just-came-home-from-work-and-what-do-I-cook night.

So far all the eggplant recipes I've listed have been vegetarian-friendly. Not so Greece's moussaka, which includes either ground beef or lamb as part of a many-layered baked eggplant dish. To make a good moussaka, you will also need to be able to whip up a bechamel sauce, which is used in the layering process.

You will note the inclusion of cinnamon and allspice in this moussaka recipe, and yes, they are essential, in my opinion. Too often we thing that spices like cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg don't belong in savory dishes, but when used judiciously, they add just the right note.

The simplest way of all to prepare eggplant is one of the best, made preferable with long skinny eggplant, such as the Japanese or Chinese varieties.  I just slice them in half lengthwise (without peeling them). paint the cut side very liberally with olive oil and run them under the broiler until they are soft and custardy.

Baba ganoush takes advantage of eggplant's propensity for getting all soft and smooshy when exposed to heat. This is another very simple dish that leaves you with a flavorful eggplant spread, really good on pita chips. Before you start this one, make sure you have some tahini (sesame paste) on hand. Here's a Persian version, but  really, baba ganoush is common throughout the entire Middle East.

If you are looking for eggplant on the other side of the Atlantic, be sure to ask for ``aubergine.'' That French name for eggplant is a favorite term designers use to describe that deep purple color that is, well, just like an eggplant skin. Italians know eggplant as ``melanzana,'' and  In India, eggplant is called  ``brinjal,'' so when you see that term on a menu in an Indian restaurant, you will know eggplant is an ingredient.

Now is the hour of eggplant abundance. And I'm a firm believer in eating foods in season. There are two big shiny purple footballs in my refrigerator that will be tonight's (and probably tomorrow's and the next day's) ratatouille. Now all I need is some good French bread.

Yes, we have no lutefisk this year

For many Norwegian-Americans, Christmas isn't Christmas without a big plate of lutefisk.   What in the world is lutefisk?   You start with torsk, which is a codfish relative caught in Norway's Lafoten Islands. After you've caught the fish, you gut it and hang it to dry in the frigid arctic air in racks outside your house.  About 80 percent of the moisture evaporates during the drying/freezing season. Here's a good photo of the drying racks.

This dried fish, which at this point is  known as ``stockfisk,''  is so hard that you could literally knock someone out by hitting them over the head with piece of it. It will keep for a very long time and, for the most part, has lost most of the intense fishy odor. When I was a little girl, I can remember seeing stockfisk stacked up like cordwood on the sidewalk outside the Scandinavian markets in Seattle's Ballard district.

Now comes the tricky part. In order to get the stockfisk into condition to be eaten, you have to soak it in lye. After this, it's soaked in water for a few days, with the water changed daily. The fish is now ready to be cooked.

Steaming  or boiling is the classic method of lutefisk preparation, although these day some people bake it in the oven. Many people do not cook lutefisk at home, but prefer to spend the winter traveling to lutefisk suppers offered by Lutheran churches in parts of the U.S. with large Scandinavian populations, or various chapters of the Sons of Norway. The ethnic press publishes a schedule of lutefisk dinners and in places like the Pacific Northwest, Minnesota or the Dakotas, you can have a lutefisk supper every weekend from well before Thanksgiving all the way to New Year's if you follow the lutefisk circuit.

Lutefisk is the centerpiece of a ``white dinner,'' and no, that term has nothing to do with the ethnicity of the servers or dinner guests. For most folks of my dad's generation, the ideal meal is steamed lutefisk with boiled white potatoes, white sauce and some lefse to soak up the melted butter. The butter provides the only color on the plate.

It's not unpleasant to eat. The drying, lye-soaking steaming process alters the texture of the fish so that it's firm without being dry, and the taste is very very very subtle, somewhere between no taste at all and the taste of the butter that's poured over the top.

Lefse, incidentally, is the Norwegian equivalent of a tortilla. Most lefse is made with potatoes, but the Selbu lefse made by my grandmother and aunts uses only flour.  It's commonly spread with butter when it accompanies a meal, but when it's eaten alone, it's spread with butter or cream and sprinkled sugar, and then rolled up or doubled over and cut into squares.

Everyone who knows me has heard me say ``uff da'' at least once a day. It's a hard phrase to explain, but I remember seeing one description of ``uff da'' as ``the words you say when you drop your lefse butter-side down in the chicken yard.''

A few years ago, when both my dad and stepmother were still alive, I flew up to Seattle and took them to a Sons of Norway lutefisk dinner. The menu was exactly as described above, with the addition of coleslaw made from the palest cabbage I have ever seen, vanilla ice cream in white paper cups, and spritz cookies baked only until they were firm, but before they were browned. The meal was the capstone of what my friend Thalia calls ``snowblind cuisine.''

The median age of the diners was somewhere between 85 and death, with most of them tall, blue-eyed, pink-cheeked  people with short noses and wearing hand-knit Norwegian sweaters. In other words, exactly what I'm going to look like when I reach that age.

Some of the serving women wore bunads, and I think there was entertainment by one of the various (largely geriatric) Norwegian male choruses that are found in areas with a large Norwegian immigrant population.

The connection of lutefisk to the Yule predates the Reformation and relates to the Advent fast of the Catholic church. It's a food of meager times, and reminds Scandinavian-Americans of the tough times their ancestors endured and survived. Swedes and Finns also eat lutefisk, but Norway is the epicenter of lutefisk production and consumption. And even here in the U.S., more than a million pounds of lutefisk are  eaten every year, although, as the older generation dies off, we lose something like 8 or 10 pounds of lutefisk consumpation per Old Norskie who travels the rainbow bridge to Valhallah.

But today lutefisk can be a convenience food. It may be hard to believe, but you can actually buy lutefisk TV dinners  manufactured by a Minnesota company. Last summer when I  was in the small  Norwegian-American fishing town of Paulsbo, Washington, I shot this sign outside the market.

I have a lutefisk plaque on the back end of Audhumla (my silver Ford Taurus, for those who are coming late to the story). It mystifies most of the world, but always makes Scandinavian-Americans laugh.  A couple of years ago, when I was on my big car trip around the nation, I stopped  to shoot some photos a scenic overlook above Oak Creek Canyon, which leads down to Sedona, Arizona. When I came back to my car, two men were standing at the back, looking at the lutefisk plaque, wondering out loud what it meant.

I explained that it was my car, and that lutefisk is Norwegian soul fool, and that it was an inside joke to others who share my ethnicity. Boy, they were not amused. One of them gestured to the other, and snarled at me ``he's a Christian pastor, and he should know about things like that.'' Holy cow! Some people have no sense of humor. Good thing I didn't have a ``my other car is a broom'' bumper sticker too.

There's an old saying about lutefisk: ``Half the Norwegians who came to American left Norway so they could get away from the hated lutefisk; the other half emigrated so they could spread the gospel of lutefisk's wonderfulness.'' Sometimes I'm in one category, and sometimes in the other.

lutefisk fish Norway Norwegian Christmas Yule food ethnic Lafoten torsk stockfisk cooking Washington+State TV+dinner immigrant  Pagan Paganism Christian Christianity Reformation Catholicism Witch Minnesota Dakota lutefisk+belt bunad