Japanese Cooking Recipes
by Fumiko Kawakami
Stuck at home during the Covid19 lockdown Japanese Cooking Recipes has provided a lovely does of armchair cultural travel with its wide range of recipes, a wealth of cultural information and reference material about Japanese cuisine.
The layout, with numbered step by step photos, and text in both Japanese and English makes each recipe look like a menu, adding to the fun of reading when stuck at home and unable to visit a restaurant. Some of the photos are a little surprising – not the sort you’d see often in Western cookery books – with blood and guts shown on the chopping board.
The recipes require lots of authentic Japanese ingredients, not necessarily easily available outside large cities in normal non-pandemic times, so I haven’t been able to test any of the recipes, though there were lots I thought sounded delicious, and many techniques I wanted to try out, not least kneading noodles by stamping on the dough with my feet!
Overall this was an intriguing and enjoyable culinary tour and worthy of a place on a cook’s bookshelf for both reference and inspiration.
[Reviewed by Zoe for FOLIO]