The Routledge History of Food

Carol Helstosky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317621126
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The history of food is one of the fastest growing areas of historical investigation, incorporating methods and theories from cultural, social, and women's history while forging a unique perspective on the past. The Routledge History of Food takes a global approach to this topic, focusing on the period from 1500 to the present day.

Arranged chronologically, this title contains 17 originally commissioned chapters by experts in food history or related topics. Each chapter focuses on a particular theme, idea or issue in the history of food. The case studies discussed in these essays illuminate the more general trends of the period, providing the reader with insight into the large-scale and dramatic changes in food history through an understanding of how these developments sprang from a specific geographic and historical context.

Examining the history of economic, technological, and cultural interactions between cultures and charting the corresponding developments in food history, The Routledge History of Food challenges readers' assumptions about what and how people have eaten, bringing fresh perspectives to well-known historical developments. It is the perfect guide for all students of social and cultural history.

Part I 1500–1700

1 The Magic of Japanese Rice Cakes

Eric C. Rath

DOI: 10.4324/9781315753454-2

In Japan there is no food as magical as the rice cake.¹ The eighth-century Record of the Geography and Culture of Bungo (Bungo fudoki) tells the story of a man who wanted to use a rice cake as a target for archery practice only to watch as the rice cake transformed into a bird and flew away.² Aristocrats at the Heian-period (794–1185) court placed a small Fifty Day Rice Cake (ika no mochii) in the mouth of a baby fifty days after its birth to ensure the child’s good luck and prosperity.³ Until the youth was six years old and had passed through the critical years that many children in that age failed to survive, every New Year a rice cake would be touched to the child’s head three times for good luck.⁴ On the third day of the New Year aristocrats ate Teeth-strengthening Rice Cakes (hagatame mochi), acknowledging that the Chinese character for tooth was similar to the one meaning a century of life, and recognizing the connection between strong teeth and longevity. At festivals and celebrations at religious institutions, rice cakes remain the focus of elaborate displays on ritual altars; they are consumed and sometimes even thrown to parishioners.⁵ In the early modern period (1600–1868) a rice cake could serve for a contest of good luck like a turkey wishbone: when two people tried to break a dried rice cake held between them, the person who snapped off the larger portion won.⁶ Folk beliefs held that a woman would lactate in the evening if she ate a special Vitality Rice Cake (chikara mochi) in the morning.⁷ The power of rice cakes to nourish was especially in demand in dire circumstances when foodstuffs resembling rice cakes, but filled with items almost unpalatable, were consumed as a last resort during famine. The fact that the steamed glutinous rice used to make rice cakes can be stretched like taffy means, according to traditional belief, that rice cakes impart a long life to those who consume them, but the rice cake’s elasticity also points to the ways that the cakes can be molded into a variety of shapes and take on a wealth of meanings depending on the context.⁸

This chapter profiles the magic of rice cakes within the context of traditional Japanese dietary culture, which refers here to patterns of eating and ideas about food that originated in the premodern period (before 1868) but continue to be salient today. Made according to the traditional methods described below, rice cakes are time-consuming to create and the refined rice used to make them is less economical to prepare than brown rice. Therefore rice cakes were traditionally reserved for celebrations rather than eaten as a daily foodstuff.

Rice cakes demonstrate a truism of traditional Japanese dietary culture that foods, especially ones prepared for ceremonies or celebrations, cannot be reduced to a single meaning but can be viewed as a type of conceptual art comparable to rock gardens, Zen-inspired monochrome paintings, and the masked noh theater – media that may have an underlying narrative but also leave the reasons for many artistic choices unspecified so as to allow and even encourage multiple explanations of appearances. Before the late nineteenth century Japan may have lacked any regional or national cuisine, but it did have a sophisticated culinary culture in which food preparation and consumption could express religious, emotional, and artistic values beyond the nutritional importance of the foods cooked and eaten.⁹ Rice cakes exemplify the complex layers of meaning in traditional dietary culture that gave purposes to food, which might begin with the most basic means for survival and expand to include attempts to work magic as well as to communicate with, embody, and even consume divine forces.

Rice cakes were also one of the earliest food commodities. Specialist rice cake makers plied their trade by the late medieval age in the early 1500s. In the early modern period, rice cakes became the basis for the development of the confectionery trade, which grew by the end of the nineteenth century into one of the most prominent types of retailers of prepared foods.

This chapter examines how a simple recipe of pounded rice could fulfill all of these roles. After taking a close look at the composition of rice cakes and how they are made, the chapter surveys the many varieties of rice cakes and the magical properties that have been ascribed to them since ancient times. Then, to demonstrate that rice cakes reveal their magic not just in their supernatural powers, but also as one of the earliest and most popular processed food commodities sold in Japan, the chapter traces the importance of rice cakes to the development of the confectionery trade from the sixteenth century. The chapter concludes with some comments about the perceived centrality of rice cakes to modern ideas about Japanese civilization.

What is a rice cake?

The Japanese word for rice cake, mochi (餅), is a homonym for the word glutinous (mochi, 糯), and reflects the fact that the stickiness of glutinous grains helps bind them together into a cake. Japanese rice (japonicd) has both glutinous and non-glutinous varieties. The distinction does not refer to gluten, the mix of two proteins in wheat, which gives bread its elasticity and helps trap air allowing the bread to rise. Instead, glutinous indicates the proportion of the starches amylose and amylopectin in the rice. The stickier, more glutinous, forms of rice have a higher percentage of amylopectin, up to 83 percent.¹⁰ Glutinous rice is best prepared steamed as when making rice cakes, as described below. When glutinous rice is boiled, it becomes pasty; but when it is steamed it becomes firm and sticky.¹¹ Non-glutinous rice is tastiest when boiled or simmered with a lot of water to make porridge. Japanese table rice today is the non-glutinous variety, which when prepared in a rice cooker, is first boiled then steamed to bring out the best flavor and consistency.¹²

Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), the founding father of the study of folklore in Japan, surmised that the origin of the word mochi was from the Japanese word meaning to hold or own (motsu). In traditional households, he contended that rice cakes were one of the few foods created for people to hold and eat solely by themselves. Except for rice cakes, all the other foods, such as the pots of porridge eaten on a daily basis, were made for the household’s collective consumption.¹³

However, the word mochi is actually the shortened form of the ancient word mochii meaning “rice cake of steamed rice,” a redundant term shortened to its modern form mochi in the seventeenth century.¹⁴ The Chinese character used to designate mochi in Japan referred in China to foodstuffs like dumplings and crackers made from wheat flour and fried in oil.¹⁵ likewise, in Japanese the word mochi can signify other dumpling-like foodstuffs besides rice cakes. For clarity this chapter will use the English term rice cake to distinguish them from other types of mochi created from different ingredients.¹⁶

Making rice cakes

The technology to make rice cakes arrived at the same time that rice came to Japan around 400 bce, and the basic method is still in use today.¹⁷ The traditional way of de-hulling rice or any other grain is to pound it in a wood mortar with a large pestle. Further pounding removes the bran, which turns brown rice into white rice. Polishing rice is the necessary first step in making rice cakes, but it is a time-consuming process by traditional methods, requiring two hours for one person using a mortar and pestle to mill just under five gallons of rice.¹⁸ Consequently, households that follow tradition and make rice cakes at home today will use rice that is already milled, but poorer households before World War II would have had to mill their own rice. Polishing rice is less economical than eating brown rice because the milling process reduces the size of the grain by some eight percent, leaving less rice to eat.¹⁹ Today, of course, inexpensive rice cakes can be purchased year-round, but given the labor and expense, it is no wonder that up through the first half of the twentieth century rice cakes were treats reserved for rare occasions, especially for poorer households.

The image of an impoverished farming family laboring to make rice cakes provides one of the most evocative scenes in Nagatsuka Takashi’s 1912 novel, The Soil (Tsuchi). The novel depicts the hardscrabble existence of a tenant farmer named Kanji, who, “longing for the taste of vegetables,” subsists instead on stolen sorghum.²⁰ Before the autumn festival of obon, a celebration for the spirits of the dead, Kanji struggles to follow custom and provide rice cakes for his family. After a hard day of work, Kanji pounds the steamed glutinous rice in a mortar with his daughter Otsugi’s help and with her brother Yokichi observing.

By the time the rice was cooked it was almost dark inside the house. The moon, which had appeared white in the sky before sunset, was now tinged with yellow, its light casting shadows from the persimmon and chestnut trees in the yard. Standing outside under the eaves of the house Otsugi ladled sticky spoonfuls of rice from the straining basket into the mortar. Every now and then she gave a little bit to Yokichi who was standing eagerly beside her. After licking off whatever had stuck to her finger she went on ladling. Then with steam rising up around him Kanji started to work with the pestle, pounding away at the hot, sticky mass as hard as he could. Whenever the end of the pestle got covered with rice Otsugi would scrape it clean with a wet spoon and push the rice in the mortar back down into a ball. Kanji would then begin pounding again. On and on they worked, the metal mortar gleaming in the moonlight, as the shadows around them deepened. Finally Otsugi reached down into the mortar and began twisting off pieces of smooth, translucent rice cake. These she placed on ginger leaves and lined up one by one on the tray beside her.

In the light of the moon that is almost full, Otsugi takes the finished rice cakes and places them on the home altar as an offering to the spirits of the dead.²¹

The reader may share the relief of Kanji’s family in accomplishing this task undertaken late at night after a hard day of work, but the reader can also recognize the beauty of the scene in a way denied the characters. The moon overhead offers only light for Kanji and his family to work by, but the autumn moon bears special significance and is linked closely with creating rice cakes. One of the most familiar autumnal images is of the rabbit, said to live on the moon, who is always pictured holding a pestle and standing near a mortar ready to make his own rice cakes.²² “Harvest moon” (mochizuki) is a homonym for the word “pounding rice cakes,” and round rice cakes are moon-like in appearance.²³ Such autumnal references suggest that a long hot summer of farm labor for Kanji and his family has drawn to a close. “For the time being there was no more work to be done in the fields.”²⁴ But Kanji remains too busy to pause and gaze up at the moon, which nonetheless shines on the rice cakes he has toiled to produce.

Nagatsuka’s descriptions capture the physicality of pounding ric...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Front Chapter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction Food and the historian
• PART I 1500–1700
• PART II 1700–1900
• PART III 1900–present
• Suggestions for further reading
• Index