The following Japan Times column dates from 1999. Some notes:
In my case, the simpleton-male-amok-in-the-kitchen was not a take from I Love Lucy. When I say I couldn’t cook, I mean it.
That was then. Now?
Well, I am no Gordon Ramsay, but I have improved. These days, I can do more than just butter bread. Even my wife eats my cooking.
On occasion. If she is starved.
Squid remains a popular sushi item, but the national diet has changed. I will wager that these days more people here prefer onion rings over deep-fried calamari.
When I first came, there was indeed a brand of curry cubes dubbed “Indian Curry,” which featured the silhouette of a Native American on the box. Neither marketers nor consumers thought very deeply about this, it seems.
Yet, it bit the dust long ago. While brands of curry will fill an entire aisle of a typical supermarket, the Indian Curry variety is sold no more.
My dislike of grilled eel is not a comic exaggeration. The eels of the world can thank me. I have eaten enough of their kindred and will do so no more. Yet… they had better look out for my wife.
Ill Will Towards Eel
Jan. 20, 1999
One of the benefits of wedding into a Japanese family is the discovery that there is much more to Japanese cuisine than just sushi and tempura.
As a matter of fact, I found there was so much more that within a few months of marriage, I had gained ten kilograms.
Part of this was due to my attitude. In those days, I had the firm conviction that anything placed on a plate could be eaten.
Japanese foods did not spook me in the least, no matter how much they mismatched my meat-and-potatoes background.
I was thus a dangerous man at the dinner table.
Another reason was that as a bachelor I had starved. I could eat, but not cook. My knowledge of the culinary craft was limited to three simple steps:
1.) Remove food wrapper; 2.) Place food in mouth; 3.) Chew, then swallow.
Such helplessness made me a frequent visitor of any restaurant I could reach. In addition, all the noodle trucks in my home of Kumamoto soon marked my street as an automatic sell.
Being married to someone who could cook was like giving a woodpecker a private forest. It didn’t matter that my bride fixed Japanese food; it only mattered that it was food.
That is not to say that I did not have cravings for good old American junk. These days such snack food is everywhere, but in the 1970s I would have committed a felony just to such down a single Oreo cookie dunked in cold milk.
When the occasional care package came from home, I ate everything. Including the box.
I still bear the emotional scars of the time I strolled through a Japanese supermarket, desperately trying to understand the photos let alone the words on the wrappings. When what to my wondering eyes did appear?
A bag of frozen onion rings!
I made a hurried purchase, zipped home, and fried them up, all the while hooting that – Yes! – there really was a God!
My first bite pushed that faith to the limit. They were not onion rings. They were squid rings.
Eating out being expensive, there were times when I did tie on an apron and attempted to discover what this “cooking” thing was all about. A study I might name Journey Without Maps, had not Graham Greene taken that title first.
The “highlight” of my cooking misadventures came with the fixing of a simple dish. I bought a small pack of “Indian” curry, one with a picture of a Native American on the cover.
Inside the box, I found brown curry cubes, which I proceeded to snap apart. I stuck these in a frying pan and turned on the flame.
That’s right. No water.
While the results did not turn out as creamy smooth as the curry I had ordered in shops, the cubes did soften enough so that I could pour the mix on top of some toast I had burned just for the occasion.
The first bite was hot. Very hot. Like, “Only a moron-would-take-another-bite” type hot.
I ate it all anyway.
When I was done, I felt I had a flamethrower in my mouth. A glass of water didn’t help. Eight glasses of water didn’t help. Neither did immersing my head in the ofuro.
I brushed my teeth six times. Still no good.
I sat in front of the fan with my mouth open and hit upon an idea. I tried gargling with a bottle of plum wine. The entire thing.
I ended up tipsy, but could at last breath without burning my lips.
I was so inept in the kitchen that the first hint I got that my Japanese girlfriend truly cared for me came was when she began to send me not love letters but idiot-proof cooking instructions.
Once married, I left all the cooking to her.
Now, almost 20 years later, I have become very discriminating when it comes to Japanese food. I pass on a number of items and trace this change to early visits to my mother-in-law’s.
Even though her daughter insisted I would eat anything (including the table if so directed), my mother-on-law fretted enormously about what to fix her new foreign son.
Frustrated by her mother’s pestering, my bride blurted out the name of a Japanese food. Anything would have done, but she chose:
“Unagi. Tom likes unagi.”
Unagi is grilled eel.
Thus, when we visited, my mother-in-law would fix me unagi.
For breakfast. For lunch. For supper. For dessert.
The end result is that I now hate unagi. Let me count the ways.
I hate unagi so much that I would not mind if half the eels on the planet were hung from the wall and then whipped with the other half. As long as I would not have to eat the outcome.
So nowadays I eat some Japanese food and I don’t eat some Japanese food.
But I still eat Oreo cookies.
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