Eating Books: The Zen of Fish by Trevor Corson

I was recently walking through Barnes & Noble, looking for some summer food reading and came across Trevor Corson’s The Zen of Fish. There were no other interesting food books on the shelf, and intrigued by the history of sushi, I decided to pick up a copy.

The Zen of Fish uses the increasingly popular blueprint of telling a story within a story. Trevor Corson uses the frame of a young woman and her time in Sushi School to go into deeper histories of fish and the evolution of sushi. The history of sushi and its appearance and proliferation in America is comprehensive and interesting, while the story of Hama Hermosa sushi school, and the female protagonist, Kate, comes up a bit bland.

I recognize the commercial need to publish a front story in order to tell the history of sushi (a book with an actual story to tell is much more commercially viable than one that is pure history) but the back story of Kate and a small, unsuccessful sushi restaurant and school in San Diego acts as nothing more than an example of the Americanization of sushi that Corson describes in his book.

Where The Zen of Fish really shines, especially for food enthusiasts and sushi lovers, is when Corson describes how we came to eat raw fish and many of the rituals of the sushi bar that we as Americans are clueless about. Corson clearly favors the traditional Japanese approach to sushi making and eating, which is why perhaps, he chose to follow a school that despite having different training practices from Japan still appears to make and serve sushi in the Japanese way. Japanese students usually have to apprentice for several years before making sushi and during that apprenticeship, they are limited to working with rice for the first few. In contrast, the American attitude towards sushi school is a much faster and less nuanced one. The students at Hama Hermosa finish their training in three months. This handful of students, the main of which, Kate, who knows next to nothing about cooking or sushi before entering the school and provides setting in which to show how sushi has truly become part of the American culture (one student even wants to be a sushi chef so he can pick up women.)

In telling the history and traditions of sushi, Corson illustrates his strong feelings on just how sushi should be eaten and how the practice has been bastardized and commercialized to a degree in which what we generally order in from our local Japanese restaurant or take away from a sushi counter isn’t really sushi. We learn that the only way to really enjoy the sushi experience and learn about the skills of our sushi chef is to sit at the bar and order Omakase (chef’s choice.) It’s also illuminating to know that scratching chopsticks together is insulting to a sushi chef (it insinuates the splinters you are trying to remove are actually there), that soy sauce and wasabi are not condiments to be slathered on your nigiri, that its especially misguided to add wasabi to your soy sauce (the flavor dissipates when it hits liquid) and that the pickled ginger is meant to be eaten in between bites of nigiri to get the palate ready for the next fish.

Being the ginger/wasabi/soy as condiment type (I was never formally taught the art of eating sushi) I found these traditions to be enlightening and I now look forward to my next, and first omakase meal at a sushi bar. As a home cook, I also enjoyed learning about the traits, preparations, and slight nuances of each fish from uni (sea urchin) and Tako (Octopus) to the many kinds of tuna served at sushi restaurants and the bizarre life of eels—apparently most of them come from either close to Korea or the Sargasso sea and no one has ever witnessed them mating.

What I didn’t enjoy about the book was the story of the main protagonist, Kate. I found the issues surrounding her to be interesting, but as a main character and key component of the story, I grew bored of her. Witnessing the hostility and bias toward female sushi chefs adds an interesting wrinkle to the book, which makes the idea of following Kate a noble one, however, Kate herself comes off as a bit childish, uninformed and dull. Other than a degree of stick-to-itiveness, there is really nothing to make the reader believe that Kate deserves to be a successful sushi chef and despite Corson’s descriptions and observations, there is nothing about her personality that makes her fun to observe.

In the end I would recommend this book for anyone interested in food, especially fish, and for anyone who finds themself eating sushi three to six times a week, something not uncommon in this city these days. That is to say that the book while entertaining at times, works more as a form of food education rather than a work to be read for pure pleasure.