Interested in Deepening Your Experience of Japanese Cuisine? Meet Elizabeth Andoh.

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If you love Japanese food but think it too mysterious and intimidating to cook at home, or if you just want to deepen your knowledge of this sophisticated cuisine, Elizabeth Andoh is someone you’ll want to get to know. Andoh, born into an American family of doctors, went to Japan on a fellowship in the late sixties, fell in love with the food and culture and married into a Japanese family. Having formally studied Japanese language and cooking, she is the author of five cookbooks. For thirty years she was Gourmet magazine’s correspondent in Japan, and is widely regarded as the go-to English language authority on Japanese food. If there are any books better than Washoku (from 2005), and Kansha (published last year) to give you a grounding in Japanese cuisine, I don’t know what they would be. Published by Berkeley’s Ten Speed Press, both are handsome books, with spare, but beautifully composed, naturally lit photographs by Leigh Beisch. While each book contains one hundred or more carefully written and well tested recipes, Andoh’s approach is not only to transmit recipes, but to lead the reader step-by-step to an understanding of cooking which is so practical and insightful that it will be useful no matter what style of cooking you pursue.

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Washoku, which she translates as “harmony of food,” opens with an explanation of the traditional ways of food preparation in Japan, including the ancient five “principles” which have long been an important underpinning of Japanese thought. Want to make sure your meal is balanced?  Does it include five colors, five flavors, five cooking methods?  She points out that these rules aren’t meant to be interpreted rigidly, but they do give you a viewpoint from which to evaluate your cooking and your thinking.She includes a detailed explanation of the Japanese pantry including beans, flour, fish, herbs, miso, mushrooms, pickles, noodles, rice, tea and much more.  This section alone is worth the price of the book. Recipe sections cover everything from stocks to noodles, to meat and poultry, to tofu and eggs, as well as dessert.

Menu Of The Week: An Early April Meal Inspired By Japanese Vegetarian Cuisine

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Clockwise from center top: Short Grain Brown Rice with Bamboo Shoots, Warm and Spicy Cabbage Slaw, Braised Tofu and Vegetables (Click on photo to enlarge).

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I recently acquired a copy of Kansha, an elegant new cookbook on Japanese vegetarian cuisine by Elizabeth Andoh, who is widely thought to be the eminent person writing in English about Japanese food. I’ll review the book in another post, but for today I want to share the menu it inspired which James Holloway and I cooked last night in Palo Alto. In addition to the three dishes in the photo, there was soup with red and white miso, a salad of mixed baby greens with wakame, and we ended with apple pie, which had nothing to do with the menu’s theme, but which I just felt like making because I hadn’t made pie in a long time! Details about this week’s meal after the jump…