The most common thing you’ll hear when you look up sushi history
is everyone saying that sushi used to be a cheap street food,
and only in modern times did it become a dish
that you could spend a fancy date night on and then regret,
but how true is this really?
The most popular types of sushi today got their
start way back in medieval Japan [1185 - 1603],
an age where samurai spent their time killing each other left and right
while looking forward to a delightful dinner of salmon sashimi.
Each of these sushi types has their own story,
and lucky for you, I tell stories.
His-tories…
Let’s start with sashimi 刺身, found in sushi restaurants,
often arranged just beautifully enough
to make you forget that it’s literally just raw fish.
Now some people might say,
“Technically, sashimi is not sushi, because it’s not served with rice.
Sashimi is its own dish.”
Which is true,
but it’s not gonna win you any friends.
Medieval Japan had these people called hōchōnin 包丁人,
or men of the carving knife.
If you were a Japanese noble
and you wanted to invite your noble friends to a party
to talk about poetry and oppressing the peasants,
you would seek out a hōchōnin.
These knife masters prepared banquets for
lords, samurai, emperors, anyone who could plausibly appear in a historical anime.
They didn’t just prepare food,
these guys spiced up the party with cutting rituals that just sliced your nipples off,
carving up fish and birds into awesome meat sculptures that you couldn’t eat,
but you could gawk at and make remarks about to your neighbors like…
“This is really something, isn’t it?”
or “He’s so talented, isn’t he?”
or “I could look at this all day.”
Popular sculptures included lobster boats,
and cooked birds with their feathers reattached
and ironically posed like they were flying away from their fate.
The cutting rituals also had a religious purpose.
Buddhist teachings banned eating animals,
which was a huge downer for the Japanese, who mostly followed Buddhism.
Luckily, these rituals sent the spirit of the animal to paradise,
allowing people to eat it without the bad karma.
It was so lucky for them that these rituals had this effect.
When the Japanese get into something, they don’t mess around.
Just look at…
flying.
Food carving and preparation became an art,
with different schools that had their own styles and secret teachings
passed down through word of mouth, sometimes through writings,
but the best bits were through words spoken from master to disciple.
Some schools traced their lineages back to ancient legendary clans like the Fujiwara,
who famously married their daughters into the imperial family,
allowing them control of the imperial court for 200 years.
Everything at a banquet had symbolic meaning.
Like your status determined how many trays of food you got.
Men of huge pp’s got 7 or more trays,
especially the emperor.
He got so much food it usually added up to at least one American meal.
Each guest had a main tray directly in front,
with rice, pickles, and condiments like salt.
For protein, they mostly ate fish and wild birds.
Dishes were packed with flavor and meaning.
For example, the anal fin of a fish,
said to be the most precious fin.
Knife masters inserted huge meaning into this fin.
A chef had to place it at the exact position on top of a food,
very offensive not to.
And they had to do it while having complete purity in their hearts.
The guest was supposed to politely refuse.
“I am anally unworthy!”
And the host was supposed to insist.
Then the guest had to eat the fin by hand, and eat it all.
It was cosmically rude to put it aside.
“Daddy, I don’t want to eat the fin.”
“Our family is disgraced!”
We don’t know what the golden position of the fin was
because it was a secret only passed down verbally.
We don’t even know the right way to eat it.
This was even a problem back then.
Medieval knife masters already were getting all bent out of shape
about guests not knowing their manners,
and knife masters hated getting bent out of shape.
One chef talked about how people should react when offered anal fin.
“They should say ‘I am unworthy of this,’ offering their appreciation to the host,
although these days no one upholds such high manners
fitting to this as in the past.
And, no one even knows the proper way to eat it,
except only for the practitioners of our art.
Today, people are served so much food
that is the only thing that they are thankful for.
It is conditions such as these that have led to the gradual decline of our art.”
How dare you not know these things that we kept super secret.
It was from these knife masters that a dish called sashimi was born.
The word first appeared in 1448.
Sashimi was fish or meat perfectly sliced and flavored with
the blood, sweat, and tears from a lifetime of training.
Each type of fish was cut to a different thickness and shape,
to highlight the flavors and texture of each fish.
By the late 1600s, sashimi became a must-have dish
at swanky dinners and celebrations.
They used dipping sauces depending on the season and the kind of fish.
One text says that a sauce of wasabi and vinegar should be paired with carp,
and pepper with vinegar was best with shark.
One school said sashimi was best served with salt and wasabi.
Eventually, in the 1800s, soy sauce became the favorite.
Next up, nigirizushi 握り寿司.
In the medieval age of Japan, sushi had a major Pokemon evolution.
Before, sushi was basically fish fermented in rice,
to preserve the fish for months or years at a time.
When done, they threw out the rice and ate the fish.
Rice was only used for its fermenting powers.
Then the Japanese thought,
“Hm…why don’t we eat the rice too?”
It was such a good idea that you wonder
why they didn’t think of it before,
and then stop wondering the first time you see fermented rice,
which has the flavor and consistency not unlike rotten porridge.
A new type of sushi was born, not made from nasty rice fermentation,
but made using sake or vinegar,
and the point wasn’t to preserve the fish but to flavor it.
Fermented sushi lost its dominance
to the fresher, younger, more attractive medieval sushi.
Sushi came to mean fresh fish with rice most of the time,
and millennials rejoiced.
New sushi dishes multiplied like new species after a mass extinction,
and nigiri was a very successful one,
good job nigiri.
It became popular after the medieval era, in the Edo Period [1603 - 1868].
Hanaya Yohei, born in 1799,
is the person credited with making nigiri popular.
But the person crediting him was his own grandson
who wrote a book about it 90 years later,
so take it with a grain of kosher salt.
Yohei was apprenticed to a moneylender until age 20
when he reached an early life crisis,
not sure what to do with his future.
He tried out different jobs before deciding to
sell sushi from a cart in the capital city of Edo.
He eventually founded his main shop in 1825.
It probably started out as just a food stand.
Most food places in Edo were not restaurants
where you entered and sat down.
They were food stalls where you ate standing about, avoiding eye contact.
His shop eventually grew into something bigger.
Yohei started out making box sushi, like many other places,
but he spotted a problem with this type of sushi,
a problem he could solve.
People made box sushi by putting a layer of vinegared rice in a box
and laying fish slices on it.
Then they put a lid with a weight on it, like a rock or something,
to squish the sushi for hours or days.
Box sushi could last up to 3 days,
but Yohei’s business was booming like an old person,
so he only had time to let his sushi rest for 3 to 4 hours.
Yohei noticed that squishing so much
squeezed all the yummy juices from the fish,
so he stopped that box sushi nonsense.
He made something else, a type of nigiri,
by lightly hand pressing the fish on a mound of rice.
His nigiri was a bit different from today’s,
about 2.5 times bigger, with 3 times more salt.
It was a hit with the customers, right in the mouth.
It put Yohei’s shop high up on the Yelp search results
and nigiririri on sushi plates forever.
Nigiri wasn’t necessarily raw.
They boiled shrimps, grilled eels,
and fermented fish lightly in vinegar or sake.
It was served with pickled ginger and water pepper,
and also alongside sashimi.
So Hanaya Yohei made nigiririri famous,
but he didn’t invent it.
That honor goes to, we think,
the people of Kaga in modern day Ishikawa Prefecture.
They had a festival food that was vinegared rice
shaped into an oval by hand,
with slices of fish plopped on top.
The fish was seasoned with vinegar, rice wine, or salt.
Then they wrapped each individual lump in bamboo grass leaves,
making cute little fish coffins,
and put them in a box.
They pressed everything using a lid with something heavy on top,
leaving it overnight.
This was not long enough for the food to spoil or the rice to harden,
but long enough for the fish and rice to share their flavors.
And for the other fish friends and family to come pay their respects.
Next up, makizushi 巻き寿司, or rolled sushi.
Remember those knife masters from before?
They had a dish that could have been
the ancestor of the sushi roll:
the kelp roll.
Fish pounded into a paste, wrapped in kelp (konbu), and boiled.
But then came the age of the sushi roll.
In the latter half of the 1700s, sushi rolls started taking off.
They were pretty much the same as today’s sushi rolls,
just rolled up rice and fish or other ingredients.
Sushi vendors started out wrapping it in all kinds of things,
like different kinds of leaves.
They also used paper, which you had to throw away before eating.
They even used the skin of the poisonous Japanese blowfish,
which was not appreciated by the Japanese blowfish
because now when it tried to blow,
it just made blllttt blllttt blllttt sounds.
Eventually, the Great Wrapper Wars of the 1700s wrapped up,
with one ingredient declaring victory.
Paper...makers loved making paper,
but they always thought it had one flaw,
you couldn’t eat it.
So they started using their papermaking techniques
to make flat sheets of seaweed,
and sushi vendors jumped on the new product like kangaroos on a sunny beach.
They were just too convenient.
Seaweed sushi rolls were the perfect street food.
You could grab one from a vendor and eat it while walking to work.
[Food for the streets]
Sushi as a street food popped off in the Edo Period.
It was a time when the Japanese went crazy printing books
because the majority of people learned this thing called reading,
which I hope to figure out one day.
Remember those food secrets that only members of cooking schools knew?
Disciples of these schools strove to master their craft
and considered their hidden knowledge sacred,
and they knew that sacred knowledge could be
sold for a lot of money.
Inevitably, these secret techniques sometimes found their way into public cookbooks,
and Edo Period authors cranked out a sushi-load of cookbooks in those times.
Now we can’t look at these books and think that was how normal people ate,
because authors didn’t really write books about
the sad grain or veggie porridges that most people ate everyday.
These were books about food for festivals or banquets or special occasions.
Today you can go to a restaurant and eat like a king,
but back then most people ate like they were a free king,
freaking broke.
So commoners in those days liked to sit and enjoy their bowls of bamboo
while reading about how the upper class ate,
like reading an entertaining work of fiction.
And for most of them, it was.
Cooking knowledge spread, and so did food stands.
The number of sushi shops multiplied like farm children,
and sushi became the most common street food in the capital.
The only other competition was tempura stands, those sons of bi--
It was a sushi revolution,
and the revolutionaries were dishes like hot sushi,
where the toppings were simmered and served on warm rice.
There was box sushi, sushi pressed in a box.
There was shingle sushi, toppings placed on a flat layer of rice,
often had multiple layers.
There was also the delightful Inari sushi,
rice and other ingredients wrapped with fried tofu.
It was named after Inari, the god of agriculture.
Also called fox sushi, because Inari uses fox servants who love tofu.
Inari, nigiri, and maki sushi were the most common street foods in the Edo capital.
It was also around this time that Japan was hit by a
tsunami of soy sauce.
They began mass producing soy sauce,
and people started dipping everything in it,
including their grandmas.
It became the most popular dipping sauce for sushi.
So was sushi only a street food until the modern age?
Well it’s half true,
because it was really only in the Edo Period [1603 - 1868].
And even at that time,
people still ate sushi at sit-down restaurants,
and it still graced the dishes of fancy parties.
Before the Edo Period, sushi was mostly enjoyed by the elites,
or was a food you had on special occasions.
And ancient sushi was nothing like the most popular forms of sushi today,
it was fermented and smelled as delicious as a dead body.
The story of ancient sushi is super interesting,
click here to check it out.
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