Fish packed in salt and rice and left to ferment for months, the rice then discarded (718)
Narezushi, the ancestor; funazushi, made with crucian carp from Lake Biwa, survives.
General knowledge · Food & drink
Sushi
Narezushi from the 8th century; nigiri from the 1820s
Food and drink — vinegared rice, and the Edo fast food that conquered the world
The word names the rice, not the fish: sushi is vinegared rice, shari, dressed with rice vinegar, sugar and salt, and anything served on or with it takes the name. It began as narezushi, fish packed in salt and rice and left to ferment for months, the rice being thrown away; funazushi from Lake Biwa survives as the pungent original. The modern hand-pressed form was a street food of Edo in the 1820s, credited to Hanaya Yohei, using fresh fish from the bay — hence edomae. Sashimi, raw fish without rice, is not sushi at all.
How to spot them
- ▸The name refers to the seasoned rice, not to the fish
- ▸Edomae — 'in front of Edo', meaning the fish of Tokyo Bay
- ▸The fermented ancestor from Lake Biwa, in which the rice was discarded
- ▸Raw fish alone is a different word entirely
- ▸Most of what is served as wasabi is dyed horseradish
Key facts
Hanaya Yohei is credited with hand-pressing fish onto seasoned rice as a street snack in the 1820s (1824)
Nigiri, or edomae style — originally a fast food sold from stalls, and much larger than today's portion.
'In front of Edo' — the phrase for fish taken from the bay the city sat on
Edomae, now shorthand for the Tokyo style and its curing and marinating techniques.
Eutrema japonicum, grated on sharkskin, which almost no restaurant outside Japan actually serves
Real wasabi. The green paste is usually horseradish, mustard and colouring.
Rolled in a sheet of Pyropia seaweed; the hand-rolled cone version is called temaki
Nori — the sheets are made by a papermaking process.
Kiyoshi Kimura paid 333.6 million yen for a single bluefin at the New Year auction of 2019 (2019)
About £2.5 million, at the Toyosu market, which had replaced Tsukiji three months earlier.
A ten-seat basement restaurant in Ginza that held three Michelin stars and was the subject of a 2011 documentary (2011)
Sukiyabashi Jiro and Jiro Ono; Jiro Dreams of Sushi. It lost its listing in 2019 as it no longer took public bookings.
Takeaway trays of raw fish on rice, scattered rather than pressed, are called chirashi
Chirashizushi — 'scattered'. Inarizushi is stuffed into a pouch of fried tofu.
Key ideas
- The vinegar is the historical point. Fermentation originally preserved the fish and soured the rice as a by-product; once vinegar could deliver the sourness directly, the wait of months collapsed into minutes, and the dish became fast food.
Quick-fire facts
- •The word denotes the vinegared rice, called shari or sumeshi, seasoned with rice vinegar, sugar and salt
- •Narezushi, recorded from the eighth century, fermented fish in salt and rice for months; the rice was discarded
- •Funazushi, made from crucian carp of Lake Biwa, is the best-known surviving fermented form
- •Nigiri is attributed to Hanaya Yohei in Edo in the 1820s and was sold from street stalls
- •Sashimi is raw fish or meat served without vinegared rice, and is not sushi
- •Maki is rolled, temaki is hand-rolled into a cone, gunkan-maki is the 'battleship' wrapped in a nori collar, and inarizushi is packed into fried tofu pouches
- •Genuine wasabi is Eutrema japonicum, grated on a sharkskin board; most substitutes are horseradish with mustard and colouring
- •Tuna is graded akami (lean), chutoro and otoro (fattiest belly)
- •Tokyo's wholesale fish market moved from Tsukiji to Toyosu in October 2018; in January 2019 Kiyoshi Kimura bid 333.6 million yen for a single bluefin
- •The conveyor-belt format, kaitenzushi, was introduced by Yoshiaki Shiraishi in Osaka in 1958
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Sources
- Shizuo Tsuji — Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art
- Alan Davidson — The Oxford Companion to Food