Since Mariko Hashimoto arrived from Kyushu in 1987, she has adapted to daily life in New York. She uses broccoli rabe instead of aka takana (spicy mustard greens), shops in the Caribbean markets of her Washington Heights neighborhood for batatas rather than Japanese satsumaimo (yellow sweet potatoes), and has learned to love the local mofongo, the Dominican version of mashed plantains with lots of garlic.
But at this time of year, Hashimoto said, she feels very Japanese, missing her home in the city of Kumamoto, where her family has a 100-year-old business brewing soy sauce and miso.
“New Year's is a most special time in Japan,” she said. “Everyone is on holiday, it is usually very cold, so people stay home to be warm and eat together instead of being busy.”
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Most schools and businesses in Japan close for a week or two around Jan. 1, after a round of parties and cleaning that traditionally mark the end of the year. (Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1873, so the New Year is celebrated now; many Asian countries still mark the new year according to the lunar calendar.)
The foods that accompany New Year celebrations in Japan are called osechi-ryori. Many are made throughout Japan; others vary from region to region. And as with most food traditions in Japan, each dish and ingredient is invested with symbolism.
“Sweet potatoes are for a sweet year, burdock root is for strength, fish roe for lots of babies,” said Naomi Sato, a teacher of English who grew up in Seattle and lives in Kyoto. “The most important thing is to eat lots of red and white food, like namasu,” she said, referring to a salad of carrots and white radish pickled in sweet vinegar. (In Kyoto, which is famous for its intensely flavored and colored vegetables, the carrots are a deep, dark red.) Red and white are considered the most auspicious and cheerful colors.
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But the weight of symbolism does not produce quiet or solemn events, Hashimoto said. Instead, the new year holiday is a time for big, boisterous meals that begin on New Year's Eve with toshikoshi (“crossing over”) soba, long buckwheat noodles in broth that are slurped whole to promote longevity and to provide warmth at midnight, when families bundle up and troop out to hear the monks at the neighborhood Buddhist temple bang the gong more than 100 times, marking the passing of the old year.
Her family begins festivities early the next day, toasting the new year with cups of hot mulled sake, sweetened and spiked with spices. The centerpiece of the holiday meal is ozoni, a clear, rich broth simmered with carrots, daikon, greens, kamaboko (pressed fish cakes) and mushrooms. In other parts of the country, ozoni is plainer.
Takako Ishikawa, a friend of Hashimoto who has lived in New York for many years (she and her husband run an upscale hair salon in Midtown) serves ozoni with a single slice of kamaboko and a small snowfall of bonito flakes. Ishikawa was raised in Nagoya, “the belly of the sea horse,” she said, referring to the shape of the Japanese archipelago.
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The two women often cook together, and each has adapted her New York kitchen to Japanese cooking skills. Hashimoto's oven is used mostly as storage space for saucepans, reflecting the rarity of baking and roasting in Japanese cooking.
Ishikawa keeps a crock of miso perpetually fermenting in her kitchen: Nagoya is known for hatcho miso, made from barley and soybeans, and aged until it is almost black. She sometimes uses the miso as a marinade for roast beef, a simple, tasty variation of an old Japanese method for making cured meat. The miso permeates the meat, making it salty and rich in flavor.
Osechi were traditionally made in advance of the holiday, so the dishes are usually salty, sweet or both: the salt and sugar preserve them throughout the holiday. “The idea is that women do lots of work beforehand and then relax,” Ishikawa said. “Although that never happens, because Japanese women are always in the kitchen.”
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Mochi, starchy rice cake, is also a necessity at New Year celebrations: it is an almost holy food in Japan, used as a religious offering at Shinto shrines and made, traditionally, by an entire town or street at the end of each year, with everyone taking turns pounding the rice in a process called mochitsuki. “When I first moved back to Japan, one thing that I could not understand was mochi,” Sato said. “It tasted like nothing to me.” Now, she says, she sees the appeal. “It is very bland, but the texture is addictive. And it isn't New Year's without mochi, and the crazy stories on the news about it.”
Mochi can be very glutinous, especially when immersed in hot soup. Every year, during the holiday week, headlines scream out the number of mochi-related choking fatalities.
Hashimoto said she prefers both the taste and the texture of grilled mochi, with its added whiff of charcoal.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
As befits the scion of a soy-brewing family, she has a highly developed palate. She is expert at using a few drops of shoyu to bring out the flavors of a dish without adding a strong soy sauce taste.
Hashimoto adds a few drops of lighter-bodied usukuchi shoyu to her namasu, adding roundness without saltiness in a perfect illustration of umami, the Japanese fifth taste.
Osechi are traditionally served in gorgeously arranged jubako, highly lacquered bento boxes. “First we look, then we taste,” Ishikawa said with satisfaction, tying a chive around a roll of smoked salmon and parsley-flecked cream cheese, one of her New York-meets-Nagoya creations.
Cooking with this level of attention to detail is on the wane in Japan as elsewhere; many families buy their osechi at fancy department stores or upscale food markets (or even at 7-Elevens). In the US, osechi can be ordered from Mitsuwa supermarkets and a few rigorously traditional places like Delica in San Francisco and Kai in New York, where a limited-edition 30-item jubako costs US$350. (One stacked jubako feeds four people.)
But expatriates like Hashimoto prefer to make their own osechi, re-creating the holiday from a distance.
“There are some things we make only at this time of year,” she said. “Cooking brings back the smell of home, the snow on the roofs, the sound of the gongs from New Year's Eve.”
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