Sanma
Sanma Wednesday September 28
why Todd will laugh at this picture
I spent a fair amount of money getting set up when I first came to Japan; recently, I've been cooking everyday in an effort to recoup those initial expenses.
When I shop for groceries, I buy what's cheap: eggs, bread, bean sprouts, tofu. These are things that I live on. Sometime, I may just pass along the recipe for Mark's Moyashi Soup. The recipe is currently still in beta, but I'll give you a hint; it contains three of the four aforementioned items.
Certain fish are also very cheap. I eat fish, but have been intimidated by the fish section of the supermarket. There they are, whole fish. I'm no sushi chef, and I'm not even Japanese: I grew up in the "Midwest Ocean". We don't eat fish because we can't trust where they came from, and even when we do eat them, it's definitely not fish that we purchased, raw, complete with head and tail.
Sanma are currently in season. They are small fish that come from the northern part of Japan (Hokkaido, I believe?), and they are routinely 70 yen each. How could I afford not to eat them? Last week at the wine and cheese party, Ken told me he had cooked sanma on the broiler and it went fine.
So, I walked into the supermarket today to find a pack of two for 120 yen (just over a dollar). At that price, I thought there had to be a catch. Maybe these fish don't have that much meat? Maybe they're really hard to prepare? Maybe for a dollar, I should go for it? They had some that were already beheaded and gutted for 170; I considered my options in front of the display case. "All right, I'll bite," I thought. "I'm not lazy, and I'm in for the whole experience." I chose the fish complete with heads and headed home.
I put one down on the cutting board. It just stared at me, frozen with terror. I offered my best French Revolution accent, asked the fish for its last words, and pressed down on the knife. The bones connecting the head and body were rather sturdy, and did not cut clean. As I did this, the fish's mouth opened under the pressure, screaming for mercy, begging to die peacefully and quickly.
I couldn't help but feel a little weird; despite the fact that I was 'killing' something that was already dead. We buy steak, chicken, and pork. We don't have to slaughter the carcass. We both know where the meat came from, but we don't want to think about it. Here, I had no choice. This whole fish, in its present state, was captured, transferred, and killed for my benefit, and now I had to handle its carcass. The blood was on my hands, literally.
I gutted it by incising straight down the bottom of the fish from the throat to the tail; apparently, you don't have to do that, but once I saw the raw version of what comes out when you do that, I will probably not eat any ungutted fishes any time soon. I'll spare those details. I have a picture of the aftermath of the scene of the crime, but I thought better of posting it just now.
Then, I just sprinkled some salt on both sides of the fish, slapped it on the broiler, and grilled it for about ten minutes. And that was that. When I separated it, the bones came off easily, and I ate it with rice and tsumen sauce (think soy). It was delicious, and I only had to make one of them. Cheap, tasty, and healthy. I'm hooked.
Right before I began eating, though, I thought about the Japanese custom of saying itadakimasu before a meal. It means "to humbly receive", implying that the food about to be consumed has been received, humbly, from the world/life/God/whatever. It was so apparently clear in these circumstances that something else had died for my benefit; I humbly received it. It's convenient to be at the top of the food chain, but it's also good to be thankful for that.
In other news, it's been a long time since I've embedded pictures inside my posts. It might be time to start doing that again. What do you think? On one hand, they there are, right here, but on the other hand, they're not as organized as they are in the albums.
