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.

Things I Like

I’ve had a ton of free time in the past couple of weeks and although I haven’t been writing about food as much as I have been, it doesn’t mean that I haven’t been eating/thinking and talking about/cooking/obsessing over food. There has probably been more food in my life than I have time to write about.

Today, in lieu of writing about any one food subject I thought I’d write down a list of foodish things that I’ve enjoyed in the past week or so.

• Goat Cheese dumplings and summer vegetable pesto. After seeing Dan Barber of Blue Hill's summer menu, I felt the need to figure out how to serve goat cheese dumplings with my own version of his summer vegetable pesto. I served these to some friends last Sunday and saw people giving each other the "holy s%#@! this is good, look" something any chef strives for. Essentially I coarsely grated potatoes with a cheese grater, coated balls of chevre with the shavings and fried them in oil so there was a crispy outside with a soft tangy chevre center.

• Eating raw fish. It's summer and raw fish is delicious, light and refreshing. It's even better with black Hawaiian sea salt.

• In keeping with the fish theme, I've started reading The Zen of Fish. It's a very interesting read if you eat sushi frequently or are interested in social histories or if you simply like food.

• Restaurants. Restaurant week is coming up and my stomach can barely contain it's excitement (that sounds kind of gross but I hope you get the point.) I also went back to Boqueria last night for the first time in a while--it was fantastic as always; and am going to 26 seats tonight. I'm excited about a little pissaladiere and sub $15 dollar entrees, a true rarity in this city.

• The Annotated Dish feature on Grub Street. This is more of a constant like for me, but I thought I'd mention it here anyway for those not in the know. I really enjoy seeing all the components of the featured dishes although I do think that the chefs probably make these dishes seem more complicated than they really are
  

• Old food magazines. My wonderful neighbors recently decided to get rid of all of their old food magazines (there were a lot) and instead of throwing them out, they gave them to me. While the articles in food magazines might be dated, the real meat of the magazines, the ideas and recipes are always fun for me to look at. I never really follow the recipes, but I still find that having access to ideas can help me grow as a cook. It's also fun to see features from 2001 magazines (about 4 years before my food obsession began to take hold) and see features on Giada de Laurentiis as a home chef and Wylie Dufresne of WD-50 (one of my favorites) as a rising star chef.
  

• I'm also excited about cooking a belated father's day dinner (they were in Sweden) for my dad and mom on Sunday and using it as an excuse to drink his very good bottle of Amarone.
  

Hope everyone has a great weekend and is able to take advantage of restaurant week next week!

Eating Books: The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

I recently finished reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a book that investigates the roots of the food we eat. Pollan, also a journalism professor at Berkeley as well as a contributing writer to the New York Times magazine and author of The Botany of Desire has taken a keen interest in the intricate web that is our food chain. In forming this narrative, he travels all over the country and takes a look at different types of meals-- a fast food meal on the highway, a meal produced on a farm and a hunted and foraged meal in order to show us how food gets from where it is in nature (or sometimes the gray, desolate feedlots of the Midwest) to our plates. The story, told through a mix of Pollan’s personal experiences and supplemented with extensive research also discusses the economic, ethical and political issues that have shaped the way we eat in this country.

Although this book might not be the type of ethereal book that makes us want to eat, the kind normally associated with food literature, it is both a very interesting and important book about food. Pollan reminds us of our detachment from what we eat and provides us a context in which to analyze our own choices regarding what we eat. He also helps us take a step back and observe how what we choose to eat really affects the environment around us. Are the organic micro-greens and asparagus you buy at Whole Foods really safe for the environment? How did roughly one third of the ingredients (close to 40 in total) in my chicken nuggets come from corn? What does it feel like to kill and eat your own food? These are all questions that are answered within Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Another aspect of the book I found particularly interesting was some of the histories and back stories regarding many of the policies surrounding food. The history of corn (which if you didn’t know is in pretty much everything we eat these days) is as fascinating as the apocalyptic image of a cow awaiting its slaughter in a feedlot and being trained to eat corn (which it doesn’t eat) is horrifying. Pollan also shows us the beauty in the harmony involved in running a true farm and explores the debate over vegetarianism.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a very contemplative book that juxtaposes the author’s entertaining personal stories with factual information regarding just about every decision we make when we purchase food, cook it and eat it. Reading this book has changed the way I see the food chain and has already directly influenced the frequent choicesi make in buying food and deciding where to eat. These decisions, as the book points out, have roots much deeper than we can see.