05/01/2003 Entry: "Book > Japanese Cooking by Emi Kazuko"

Japanese Cooking [link]
by Emi Kazuko
with recipes by Yasuko Fukuoka

I was picking up sushi on the way from work to the AnimeUNSW screening on Friday, and two doors down from said sushi is an ongoing book sale place. I walked in there because it felt like a good thing to do, found two wonderful Japanese cookbooks and walked out with them.

This is the better of the two books I picked up, and it's practically an encyclopaedia of Japanese cooking info - the actual recipes start on page 124. That's because the preceding pages are a great educational section dedicated to traditions, history, cookware and ingredients. The recipes themselves vary a great deal, covering every possible course, situation and season. I hate books that "adapt" Japanese cooking to more conservative tastes or regular supermarket ingredients, and thankfully this isn't one of them.

The one downside to this book is some of the terminology used - for example, mangetout (snow peas) and skipjack tuna (bonito). Such terms are supposedly the UK ingredient names, with US names in brackets... but sheesh, all I've ever called them has been snow peas! To balance that out, there's a short and sweet shopping guide in the back of the book covering America, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Now to try making some of the recipes... I need a daikon grater. ;_;