Nanakusa-gayu

Today is the 7th of January. Woohoo, you say, thank you Captain Obvious (especially if you’re the Architect).

Well, kids, you might not know that on the 7th January you should eat nanakusa-gayu, which is seven herbs (nana is seven and kusa is… well, grass, but let’s be flexible here) rice porridge (okayu, or gayu as part of a word). Rice porridge is tastier than it sounds. You might have come across it as congee or bubur. Imagine soupy rice mixed with whatever your heart desires. That’s right, yum. So today, you add in the seven herbs of spring and basically you’ll be right for the year.

There’s a whole bunch of history around why you should eat seven herbs on the seventh day of the new year, but I’ll let you use your fabulous googling skills for that. Otherwise, wiki’s all over it.

The seven herbs I’d use if I were in Japan are pretty specific to those little islands. Let’s see, we’ve got (thanks wiki):

• Japanese parsley (seri)
• Shepherd’s purse (nazuna)
• Jersey Cudweed (gogyō)
• Common chickweed (hakobera)
• Nipplewort (hotokenoza)
• Turnip (leaves) (suzuna)
• Daikon (leaves) (suzushiro)

I see. So, some of those things I’ve never even heard of, let alone be able to get my hands on in Brisbane. In my nanakusa-gayu I have:

• Daikon with leaves
• Turnip leaves (going well so far)
• Mizuna (at least it’s a Brassica?)
• Spinach (not English spinach, but still, a bit of a departure)
• Garlic chives (wtf?)
• Basil (oh my god, woman, you’ve gone mad)
• Coriander (that’s it, this is completely ridiculous, that’s nothing like the proper recipe).

This is where my harebrained, over-thought theory comes in: that in cooking, some ingredients are important because of what they are. Others are important because of why they are. Let me explain.

There’s two levels to this idea. The first is your general difference between the ingredients that define a dish and those that are supporting players. Like coq au vin but with duck and beer instead of coq and vin – most people would agree that it’s not coq au vin (although it might still be tasty – but that’s a different post). So chicken and wine are important because of what they are. But say you’re out of button mushrooms so you use field, and instead of thyme you can only get rosemary. A purist might have a problem with this kind of substitution but most of us would see these as minor and not really affecting the coq-au-vin-ness of it all. Those are why-ingredients.

See also: why I use rice bubbles in my okonomiyaki instead of tenkasu. Short of making my own little drops of cooked tempura batter from scratch, I’m not going to be able to get those in Australia. So I think: the purpose of the tenkasu is to lighten the batter, add air. What’s something without much flavour, that’s light and a bit crispy and would work in much the same way? And what comes out at the end is very much still okonomiyaki.

On a different level, there’s also ingredients that have significance over and above the flavour of the dish. On a fundamental level, sekihan without azuki is not red-bean rice. You put some other type of bean in it and it’s maybe borlottihan or lentilhan. But also, sekihan is about celebration, and without the red beans the rice doesn’t have the same meaning. The flip side of that is something like nanakusa-gayu. The nanakusa bit is not really about the flavour those herbs provide, and the main aim is a bowl of okayu with local spring greens in it to mark a particular day. So by substituting what I can source in an Australian summer… well, purists might have a problem but I reckon it does okay.

So what? you might ask, especially if you waded through both those paragraphs and are still reading. Well, a practical point is that if you’re thinking about adapting a dish but not sure what can be substituted for what, maybe this is a useful way to think about it. So you don’t have capsicum, but you have carrot. Whether that’s a problem or not depends on whether the capsicum is in the recipe for what it is (a capsicum, duh), or why it is (freshness, vegetable matter, crunch, sweetness, colour).

The other point, for me, is that I think a lot about food and culture. When you turn up in a new culture, what does it mean when your food traditions are forced to adapt? Is there a line you can draw, and on one side you are still following your traditions, and on the other creating new ones? Does the act of adapting the local food to the imported culture (or vice versa) make your links back to that culture stronger or weaker?

But enough of this rambling. Here’s a picture of my dinner instead. Arguably, nanakusa-gayu?

Advertisement