Oishii: The History of Sushi by Eric C. Rath

Abstract

Reviewed by: Oishii: The History of Sushi by Eric C. Rath James Farrer (bio) Oishii: The History of Sushi. By Eric C. Rath. Reaktion Books, 2021. 223 pages. $25.00, cloth; $25.00, E-book. When asked about the most surprising development she covered in her decades as restaurant critic for The New York Times, Mimi Sheraton pointed to the astonishing popularity of Japanese cuisine in the United States. "Especially sushi. I would never have thought that you could convince so many [End Page 217] Americans to eat raw fish." 1 Eric Rath's concise monograph Oishii: The History of Sushi explains this surprising rise of sushi, filling in historical blanks while simultaneously showing how this story might seem even more improbable when looked at closely. Far from its current image as a fashionable and palatable snack food, sushi is shown to have a much longer history as a fermented foodstuff, whose earliest manifestations would certainly challenge our contemporary palates with their pungent and sour tastes. In engaging prose, Rath takes us from these ancient forms of preserved sushi through to its modern derivatives, such as calorie-rich crunchy dragon rolls. In its broadest strokes, the story is one of how sushi went from being a way of preserving foods through grain-based fermentation, to an industrialized snack based on vinegared rice and fresh ingredients that rely upon a globalized cold chain. Like many things in Japan, sushi is shown to have Chinese roots, at least etymologically. The Chinese characters for writing sushi 鮨 and 鮓 appear in Chinese dictionaries two millennia ago, in which they refer to a fermented dish made from salt and fish. Japanese seem to have adopted these characters interchangeably to refer to foods preserved with rice and other grains that had undergone lactic acid fermentation. Ultimately, it is unclear if these culinary practices were borrowed from China, originated in Japan independently, or, as some writers suggest, were developed first in Southeast Asia and spread to other coastal regions of Asia. In any case, Rath writes, the earliest forms of sushi depended on grains as a source of starch for lactic-acid fermentation rather than as a fresh ingredient. The first forms of sushi were thus also very sour, one of the possible original meanings of the word "sushi" in spoken Japanese (p. 14). Rath's book is written not only for the historian but also for the adventurous gourmand, including those who would like to try their hand at producing some of these archaic forms of sushi for themselves. Some recipes are not for the cowardly. The recipe for funazushi, for example, as provided by a fishing family from Lake Biwa, requires five pounds of freshwater carp and 6.3 liters of cooked rice. It is fermented for three months in a bucket with a heavy stone on its lid (p. 15). In the case of funazushi, the rice is primarily used as a fermentation agent and may be discarded or replaced with fresh rice before consumption. Early recipes, Rath writes, might involve letting the fermentation process continue for months or even years. Indeed, one of the main goals of Rath's text is to point out that sushi has always been a reinvented and evolving product, and there is no one original way of making it that is "traditional" or "authentic." [End Page 218] Rath provides a narrative history of the various dishes that have been labeled sushi, accompanied by first-person descriptions of his encounters with the forms of fermented sushi still available to contemporary consumers. Funa zu shi, for example, is described as having an "odour of blue cheese" with a mouthfeel like prosciutto or salami and "sourness" that puckers the mouth and turns the head—at least Rath's own (p. 21). For a book about food, such head-turning personal accounts are both illustrative and evocative, bringing to life dishes that otherwise might seem like eccentric culinary holdovers. As we learn, many historic varieties of sushi are still available in isolated spots in rural Japan today, and finding out about where they still can be encountered is one of the added treats of reading this book. While Rath's text is eminently...