When it comes to food, there are some things that get less when you share them, and others that get more.
When you share, it is the produce that diminishes. Whether it is special rice or vegetables unique to this region, there is only a limited quantity. As the size of the fields and the year’s harvest are fixed, if more goes to one person, that much less will reach someone else. When you share, the amount simply decreases accordingly. It is only natural.
When working in product development, one often sees competition for high-quality ingredients. If we look back in history, spices and sugar have even been the spark that ignited conflicts between nations. That is just how fiercely ingredients are contested.
However, I’ve never heard of a war breaking out between countries over a recipe.
It may seem obvious. After all, even if you give away a recipe, it doesn’t diminish the amount you have. There’s simply no reason to fight over it in the first place.
I’ve made my living teaching cookery for many years. Both recipes and techniques have genuine value, and I’ve turned them into products. However, there is one clear difference between them and ingredients.
The more you share this recipe, the more it spreads.
Even after 20 years of teaching, not a single dish has been lost to me. If anything, with every lesson I’ve given, my own understanding of it has deepened. And with every person I’ve taught, the number of people in the world who can make that dish has grown.
That’s why, within families, recipes for those delicious dishes are still being passed back and forth with ease even today. ‘In our house, we use miso like this,’ or ‘In our house, we fry it first,’ and so on.
It was in relation to Mr K that I felt this most clearly.
Ms K was a long-standing student at my cookery school. Before I knew it, she had started running her own cookery classes from her home. I only found out about it later, quite by chance.
It was then that it struck me. The recipe I had given to Ms K had not left my possession. I am continuing to run my cookery classes as usual. And yet, in Ms K’s kitchen too, that same recipe is being passed on to someone else. Although the number of copies I have has not decreased, the number of people cooking in the world has increased by the number of people who have received it from Ms K.
And if the person who learnt it from Mr K passes it on to someone else, it will spread even further. One becomes two, and two becomes four. With materials, the more you share, the less you have left. But with methods, the more you share, the more they multiply.
I noticed the same thing with sake lees.
After explaining the properties of sake lees at a seminar, I sometimes hear about unexpected ways people have used them. ‘It tasted lovely when I added it to this,’ or ‘That’s how we use it at home,’ they’ll say. They were all things I’d never even thought of myself.
All I did was offer one perspective on what sake lees are. Yet, once I’d given them away, people found more and more ways to use them, and they were returned to me. Nothing has been taken from my hands.
Nowadays, the way it is handed over has changed.
I’ve made it possible to view sake lees recipes on a smartphone. It’s set up so that if you open the app, the instructions appear whenever you need them.
Come to think of it, it’s rather strange what I’m doing. After all, I’m revealing my entire hand. But even if I do reveal it, nothing is taken away from me. It simply means there will be more people who know how to make it.
And then, some of them actually try making it in their own kitchens. A few of those, in turn, adapt the recipe to their own taste and pass it on to others. Sake lees are being used in the kitchens of people I’ve never even met. When I think about it, it feels rather strange.
In the past, this wouldn’t have been possible. The only people you could share your methods with were those right in front of you: people who could come to the classroom, those who lived nearby, or those you’d had the chance to speak to. Nowadays, the scope of who you can share them with has expanded beyond comparison.
The reason recipes circulate so freely these days is probably because they don’t diminish when shared. If they did, things wouldn’t be like this. Nobody would reveal their secrets.
That’s why the recipe spreads of its own accord.
Dishes from other regions are introduced, blend with local ingredients, and before you know it, become part of the local cuisine. It was the same with oden, which has continued to take on different forms in each region.
The way it is prepared means that, rather than being harvested and disappearing once it has spread, it blends into the land and thrives there. Whilst ingredients tend to diminish when divided, cooking has, from the very beginning, possessed the opposite quality: the ability to multiply when shared.
This property, whereby dividing something causes it to increase, is at work on our dinner tables every day.
I find myself thinking back to the school meals at nursery. Even when the menu was the same, what each child could eat varied from one child to another. Nevertheless, by portioning the food into different sizes in the kitchen, everyone was able to eat at the same time, in the same room, and in the same circle.
What people cannot eat varies from person to person. If we do nothing, we cannot simply serve the same meal to everyone. However, as long as there is scope for creativity on the part of the cook, food can bring people with different dietary requirements together around the same table.
Ingredients can be the deciding factor in whether people like something or not. But the way it’s made can bring people together, depending on how much thought you put into it. Here, too, the ingredients and the method were completely different.
It was the same when I was thinking about the products.
It was when I was making plant-based gelato, whilst wondering whether a substance made by fermenting sake lees with lactic acid bacteria could be used as a substitute for yoghurt.
At the time, I hadn’t set out to make it without dairy products. However, as a result, it has opened up more options for people who avoid dairy.
Rather than excluding, we should be including. This was a continuation of what the veteran canteen staff used to do as a matter of course in the school canteen kitchen.
The more you share, the more there is. You can bring together people who would otherwise go their separate ways. With most things, the more you share, the less there is; they become depleted. But this was not the case with food. Unlike other things, food increases the more you give away, and it never runs out, no matter how much you share.
That was probably what I felt when I first learnt about Mr K. The things I gave him did not diminish, but multiplied. I think that was simply a quality inherent in the act of cooking from the very beginning.
However, whilst I say ‘preserving’ it, I feel this is slightly different from simply keeping it exactly as it is. This is because cuisine has always evolved whilst continuing to exist. Just as oden has taken on different forms in different regions, cuisine has changed shape whenever lifestyles have changed, yet it has continued to exist nonetheless.
It wasn’t because things stayed the same that it lasted; it was precisely because they changed that it lasted.
Change and continuity—two concepts that are usually at odds with one another. How has the world of cuisine managed to reconcile these two?
TERUMI ISHIBASHI
FARM8 Co. Ltd.,
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