Washoku

She picked up ideas from chatting with local vendors, reading ladies magazines, and watching television cooking shows. She proved an excellent role model, demonstrating that washoku was not a rigid set of rules, but rather a flexible framework in which to collect and consider new ideas.

Yoshoku is distinguished from washoku, or “Japanese food,” but their histories are intertwined. That beef (let alone Salisbury steak) is eaten at all in Japan can be traced to an afternoon in 1872 when Emperor Meiji had meat for his lunch and, in doing so, reversed a ban on eating beef that had lasted 1,200 years.

Traditional Japanese food, or “washoku”, has been designated an intangible cultural asset, making Japan’s national cuisine only the second after France’s to be so honoured.

Akemi Yokoyama, a London-based Japanese chef and washoku teacher, said: “Fundamentally, sushi has to be prepared fresh. The problem with the supermarket sushi is the shelf life.”[…] Washoku has edicts on everything from the angle of a chef’s hand as it moulds a piece of sushi rice, to the adornment of seasonal sprigs of foliage – all part of a quest for harmony and balance in flavours, colours and presentation.