Last week I met Karen Pinchin whose fascinating book about tuna, Kings of Their Own Ocean, will be published in July. We began discussing the origins of sushi in America, which reminded me of a talk I gave at Worlds of Flavor in 2010. There are far more scholarly articles on the subject – but I think you might find this interesting.
Incidentally, the Mr. Tsuji I reference is president of the Tsuji Culinary Academy in Osaka, and co-author (with his father) of Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art. (MFK Fisher wrote the first introduction to the original book; I wrote the introduction when it was reprinted 25 years later.)
Mr. Tsuji gave us the history of Japanese food in its native land; I want to tell you a different side of the story. This is a capsule history of Japanese food in America.
Most foreign cuisines landed in America with immigrants: longing for a taste of home they inevitably set up restaurants for themselves in this strange new place. That is how the first Chinese dishes were introduced to America, how we learned about Mexican and Salvadoran food, the way German and Italian restaurants came into the culture. This was how most of us also discovered the cooking of Thailand and Viet Nam.
But that is not how Japanese food was introduced to America.
The first reference I can find to Japanese food in America is a 1914 article about Bohemian San Francisco in which the writer, Clarence Edwards, is treated to raw fish for the very first time. One would think he would find it unpalatable, but to his surprise he found the bream-like fish, “most delicious, delicate, and with a flavor of raw oysters.”
But he was an anomaly. For a very long time, when you said Japanese food to an American the immediate response was “sukiyaki.” The first restaurants were not aimed at a Japanese clientele – they were intended to serve a curious, thrill-seeking audience. A 1939 book reviewing restaurants in New York speaks of the “theatrical nature of Japanese cuisine,” pointing out that, “Japanese cooking is a derivative of the Chinese…. It does have, however, some original features of its own, especially in regard to suki-yaki.” Among the hundreds of restaurants another New York critic of that period reviewed in his book, exactly two were Japanese. The highlight of this review is an aside: “At one time you could great real saki wine here if you were known. That was during Prohibition. I doubt it now.”
Japanese restaurants were a novelty, they were relegated to big cities, and they essentially stuck to sukiyaki. This view of Japanese food did not change until after the war when Americans began traveling to Japan on business.
There they were treated to resmi banquets, multi-course Kaiseki affairs that mostly baffled them. But many also experienced simpler Japanese meals, and a few enjoyed sushi so much that a few Japanese investors were inspired to open sushi restaurants in America. These were high-end places, intended for an elite. When Gourmet Magazine wrote about sushi in the mid-fifties the article was called Song of Sushi, and it contained a single recipe – for fugu sashimi.