This cookbook shows how you can cook Japanese food using locally-available ingredients in Sweden. For a very long time, people used to eat what they could get for surviving. However, today, we have the luxury to choose. People look for pleasure and excitement in food as well as safety and reliability. The problem is that these two needs don’t always get along with each other because organic and locally-produced food is an important factor from safety and reliability perspective, but people enjoy multicultural diet supported by a lot of imported ingredients at the same time.
The project aimed to deal with this paradox, and aimed to introduce Japanese food culture in a suitable way in today’s Swedish environment, using as much locally available ingredients as possible. After visiting farms and making many cooking experiments as well as food tastings, a cookbook was made for introducing traditional Japanese dishes in home-cooking style.
The book is written in 3 languages; English, Swedish and Japanese. Numbers of modifications were made in the book to make the food easier or possible to cook in the foreign environment. 30 recipes are introduced for 7 meals. Original Japanese dinner at normal household is composed of many small dishes, and people take what they want as much as they want. However, it is too much for everyday life in Sweden.
Therefore, the book followed a style called Ichiju-Sansai in which a meal is composed of a bowl of rice, a cup of soup, one main dish and two side dishes. This style is often used in casual restaurants and for school food in Japan. Everything is presented in one big plate in the book, although everything is originally served separately in small plates in Japan.
In the recipes, inaccessible ingredients in Sweden were substituted with locally available ingredients except soya products and seaweeds. These two were kept because they are the keys to healthy Japanese diet, and also because they would get more accessible in the near future in Sweden according to the research made in this project. To get in touch with Moè Takemura, visit the link below.