Bibliography

I collect cook books the way
some people collect baseball cards. I have all of these books, and I’ll
try to bring a bunch of them to class; I’ve also linked to them at Amazon.com
if you want to buy any of them yourself. I’ve listed them in the order
of how often I cook from them, rather than alphabetically.

English-language
cookbooks

• Japanese
  Home-Style Cooking
  edited by Mihoko Hoshino, Heian International, Inc., 1996.
  The first Japanese cookbook I ever bought, and still one of my favorites.
  Shizuo Tsuji’s book is the ultimate English-language Japanese cookbook
  of gourmet and traditional foods; this one is about what people actually eat in their homes. The one problem recipe I’ve encountered in this
  book is the sekihan recipe – I use Tsuji’s steaming method instead of
  this one’s rice cooker method, because when you cook glutinous rice
  in a rice cooker it turns out a sticky greasy mess, much like his description.
  His process is more intensive but in that case it’s worth it. The rest
  of the recipes in this book have been just fine for me, though. I’m
  impressed by both the simplicity of the directions and the breadth of
  coverage in less than 100 pages.

• Japanese
  Cooking: A Simple Art
  Shizuo Tsuji, Kodansha International, 1980.
  People call this the Bible of Japanese cooking. They’re mostly not kidding.
  This is hands down the most comprehensive and detailed Japanese cookbook
  in English. It’s The Joy of Cooking Mark II, only for Japanese
  food. If there’s anything you want to know how to cook and it’s not
  in here, you’re going to have to find a Japanese language cookbook that
  contains it. There might be an obscure web page in fascinatingly worded
  English painstakingly put together by a native Japanese speaker who’s
  practicing English for a class project, but otherwise, this is the book
  to look in for the broadest range and the greatest depth. It’s a gourmet’s
  cookbook. Some of the recipes are intimidatingly complex. But a large
  percentage of them aren’t intimidating at all. …what can I say? It’s
  a fabulous book. Ask for it for a birthday present or something.

The two books above stand
out head-and-shoulders for me, the first because it’s got everyday cooking
of the type I saw people actually doing on a daily basis, and the second
because it’s comprehensive and magnificent.

The next four are fairly
evenly matched in terms of how often I reach for them, to the point where
it was tricky deciding which to recommend first. I finally decided the
ranks based on "how hard you’d have to pull to get the book out of
my hands if it was the last copy I could find"… which is pretty
hard for all of them, really, since I cook from at least one or more of
these books at least once a fortnight.

• Bento
  Boxes: Japanese meals on the go
  Naomi Kijima, Graph-sha Publications, 2001.
  I don’t think Bill Gates could pay me enough to give up this book. A
  lot of cookbooks give you single recipes without an idea of how to make
  them turn into a meal. Every page of this book contains all the recipes
  for the pictured meal — in some cases, more than one full meal per
  page. It’s a cookbook for people who’ve read cookbooks and appreciate
  information efficiency — rather than taking the time and page space
  to spell out "cut the carrot into matchstick-sized pieces, approximately
  one-eighth-inch square by two inches long, also known as julienning,"
  it says "julienne the carrots." So it assumes you know some
  basic terminology, but it’s never made an assumption I haven’t been
  familiar with. And for most recipes, the quantities are given in single-serving
  amounts – ideal for me as a single person and easily scalable to a party
  by multiplying by the number of people. I love this book.

• Japanese
  Cooking: the traditions, techniques, ingredients, and recipes
  Emi Kazuko and Yasuko Fukuoka, Hermes House, 2003
  I found this book on the remainder table at a local bookstore. There’s
  no excuse for that! Seriously, this book is far better than it has any
  right to be at that price. The first half is the most detailed and helpful
  explanation I’ve ever seen of how to select, store, and prepare a wide
  assortment of Japanese ingredients that can be unfamiliar to Western
  cooks. The second half is full of good-looking, tasty, unintimidating
  recipes. When I went through marking the pages with recipes I wanted
  to discuss in either of the two classes, this book ended up with far
  and away the most stickies. The author is wonderful too – Emi Kazuko
  is referenced in the acknowledgements of several of my other
  English-language Japanese and Asian cookbooks, and she was on the editorial
  staff behind some of the Japanese-language cookbooks too. I don’t know
  whether she’s bilingual or has a translator, but either way, it doesn’t
  get any more authentic these days. She’s written a lot of other cookbooks
  in both languages that I’d love to find somewhere that I can browse
  through them…

• A
  First Book of Japanese Cooking
  Masako Yamaoka, Kodansha International, 1996
  This one is somewhere between home cooking and party cooking, with some
  recipes for each type. It also includes a section with menus in the
  back, describing which recipes to cook together for a yakitori party,
  several different scales of sushi party, a tempura party, a teppan/mixed
  grill party, and so forth. If you’re looking for a book that hits both
  everyday home cooking and fancier home entertaining, this is a good
  book for it.

• Rice
  Bowl Recipes
  Mineko Asada, Graph-sha, 2000
  An entire book of donburi. Over 100 of them. I love this book. Very
  nearly everything looks gorgeous and delicious, and I can chuckle at
  some of the "Western-style" things that don’t (the hamburger
  donburi is just hilarious, and the only objective problem with the eggplant
  and bacon donburi is that I can’t stand most eggplant). The only reason
  I don’t cook from this book more often is that I can’t. Not that the
  recipes are complex — they’re clearly explained and straightforward.
  The problem is this is central Illinois. We’re just too darn far inland
  for things like sushi-grade abalone or tai or tarako — and we just
  don’t get some of the more distinctively Japanese ingredients like yamaimo
  or raw katsuo or fresh shiso leaves. So this book is both inspirational
  and heartbreaking for me — you just know they wrote it with people
  from New York or Los Angeles and their coastal big-city markets in mind…
  still, I try my best with the ingredients I can find, and I love donburi
  so I try pretty often, but I just have to stop and sigh some days.

The rest of these find use
as reference books, but I don’t refer to them quite as often as the others.
Each of them have unique recipes, and some of them have unique philosophies
(such as the vegetarian sushi book which sounds like a contradiction in
terms but doesn’t have to be), but when it comes right down to it I read
the books below for ideas and inspiration rather than actively cooking
from them on a weekly basis. If they answer a particular dilemma you’re
considering, though, go for it. They’re all good books. I’ve used all
of them at one time or another (particularly the vegetarian books, since
I once cooked for 15 hours to serve bento lunch to my office-mates, including
a vegan.)

• Vegetarian
  Sushi
  Brigid Treloar
  I use this one more as visual inspiration than as a cookbook; it’s got
  gorgeous presentation ideas, but I’m just not that fond of (for example)
  red and yellow peppers. I’d much rather have a piece of nice fresh tuna
  or salmon than a strip of red pepper on top of a piece of rice. On the
  other hand, I’m not a vegetarian, though I like tofu and almost never
  eat red meat — I just love sashimi too much! It also has interesting
  ideas for some nontraditional but tasty-looking dessert sushi made with
  fruit.

• Japanese
  Vegetarian Cooking from Simple Soups to Sushi
  Patricia Richfield
  Good for ideas but chock-full of unforgivable typos in the Japanese
  terms – the typesetter or proofreader should be shot. From one section
  to the next, the same term will be spelled several different ways, and
  as often as not some of the ways won’t be structurally possible in Japanese
  ("inska" vs inaka (country-style) miso jumped out at me, spelled
  two different ways on two successive pages, when what you’ll actually
  find in the market will simply be called aka (red) miso; and every other
  page has an example like that). If you don’t already know a term, don’t rely on seeing it in this book, because if it’s not familiar from elsewhere
  it’s probably wrong. That said, the recipes are useful for reference
  when trying to adapt regular Japanese cooking (which relies heavily
  on eggs and fish) for vegetarian or vegan cooking.

• Practical
  Japanese Cooking: Easy and Elegant
  Shizuo Tsuji (posthumous), Koichiro Hata, et al, Kodansha International,
  1986.
  Tsuji’s Japanese Cooking is both monumental and seminal. This
  one, taken from his notes and finished by an assistant after his death,
  is just average. The other book doesn’t have many pictures, though,
  and this one is full of them. If you really like pictures, pick it up,
  but there really are other cookbooks that do the same things better.
  I bought it on the strength of his name, and have been vaguely disappointed
  ever since, though I do page through it for serving ideas because a
  lot of the pictures are gorgeous.

• Not
  a Japanese cookbook per se, but invaluable if you have a rice cooker:
  Ultimate
  Rice Cooker Cookbook
  Beth Hensperger, Julie Kaufmann
  This book covers both the push-button kind of rice cooker and the microcomputer
  kind of rice cooker. I’m glad I own both, and this book gives you great
  ideas to do with both. There are some things you can cook in the simple
  rice cooker that you can’t cook in the complicated one, and vice versa.
  So I steam salmon and vegetables in the push-button cooker, and I make
  rice pudding for breakfast in the microcomputer cooker. If you’ve got
  a rice cooker, this book is full of fast dishes you can cook entirely
  in the rice cooker — and the authors hit on not only Japanese-influenced
  one-pot dishes, but also versions of Spanish paella and Indian-inspired
  spiced and saffron-tinted rice and more.

Japanese-language
cookbooks

I’m going to romanize the kanji
in the Japanese-language cookbooks I brought to class, because a lot of
American computers don’t have the Japanese IME installed, so the kanji
would just look like squiggles…

• O-shougatsu Ryouri 161
  ten
  Butikku-sha (Boutique-sha), ISBN 4-8347-2101-9
  This one is full of New Year’s recipes — with collections presented
  of Japanese concepts of New Year’s celebrations around the world. (This
  is the one with the hilarious concepts of American New Years food, including
  the garlic bread with octopus…) The recipes that are actually Japanese
  are gorgeous, and everything’s presented with an eye towards party hors
  d’oeuvres presentations. It’s not everyday food, but it’s fun to drool
  over.

• Home Recipe
  Graph-sha, ISBN
  4-7662-0855-2
  (Yes, it really is called "Home Recipe" in English…) For
  some reason I haven’t puzzled out, both of these books open and flip
  in the Western order rather than the Japanese order like the other Japanese
  language books I own. Anyway, this one does live up to its name — the
  recipes are definitely home-style, family-friendly, and not fiddly-hors-d’oeuvres.
  And just like you’d probably find stir-fry recipes in your average American
  cookbook, there are recipes like paella and rigatoni with cheese as
  international home-cooking designates in here too. Most of the recipes
  are Japanese, though, and the paella and rigatoni recipes don’t seem
  to suffer from the "what were they smoking?" phenomenon of
  the "Western" New Year’s recipes; the paella in particular
  looks really tasty…