Category Archives: Series: Japanese Studies

18th Century, Food and Drink, Posts, Series: Japanese Studies, Spring 2026

The “Silent Summary of Cooking” in Feudal Japan

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By Miguel Ángel Pelayo Prieto

In eighteenth-century feudal Japan, some of the most impressive culinary work was also the least visible. Court chefs prepared elaborate banquets for lords and shoguns, yet their names appear only in private records. Their expertise lived not in bustling restaurants or published books but in personal notes, oral instruction, and years of accumulated practice. The story of Funaki Den’nai (1685–1759) offers a rare window into that hidden world of personal recipes and the extensive research it entails.

Den’nai was the head chef of the Kaga Domain, a wealthy regional court on the Sea of Japan governed by the powerful Maeda clan. He came from modest origins, the son of a handyman in a vassal household, with only three years of cooking experience as a commis, appointed official cook at just twenty-two, apparently through direct recognition of his talent. He was recruited after an unsuccessful call for skilled chefs, the strict selection process having weeded out all other candidates. The importance the Maeda placed on their head chef stemmed from the clan using cooking as a tool to win over the central government, and from their lords having a special personal interest in the culinary arts and local food culture. The Maeda supported Dennai’s career over the following decades, working between the domains of Kanazawa Castle in Kaga and the Edo villa (modern Tokyo). He rose to become the principal administrator of the Maeda kitchens, a position prestigious enough to earn him a samurai title, making him one of the domain’s celebrated hōchō samurai, or “knife samurai.”

Fig. 1. Asano River in Kaga, near Kanazawa Castle. In Tabimiyage (Travel Souvenirs) by Kawase Hasui (1920). Image courtesy of Japan National Diet Library Digital Collections

What made Den’nai exceptional was not just his cooking but his compulsion to write everything down. He began keeping personal notebooks at thirty-four with a treatise on banquet cuisine and continued for the rest of his life: food taboos, medical combinations, Japanese and foreign recipes, current affairs, and opinions on the declining state of Japanese cooking. His masterwork was the nine-volume Ryōri Mugonshō (Silent Summary of Cooking), begun in 1727 and completed after his death by his son Yasunobu. It is the most comprehensive culinary encyclopedia of the Edo period (1600-1868).

The Silence of Ryōri Mugonshō meant that it was never meant for the public eye. It was a working document, a private archive compiled for the chefs who would succeed him, so that the knowledge that sustained Kaga’s reputation would live on. What Den’nai thought his successors needed to know about cooking went far beyond recipes. The work reads less like a cookbook and more like a natural history of food. Each entry on an ingredient records its regional names, sourcing locations, quality grades, preservation methods, seasonal variations, and medicinal uses. Sketches help identify easily confused plants and mushrooms. Historical notes trace an ingredient’s origins and regional food customs. That breadth reflects how Den’nai developed his expertise. He had three main sources: written texts (Chinese herbology, Japanese cookbooks, classical literature), informants (from farmers and fishermen to leading herbalists and doctors), and his own direct observation. The three years he spent as a chef in rural Kaga left traces throughout the encyclopedia: entries on acorns and horse chestnuts—foods too astringent and humble for any court menu— describe how mountain communities processed them, steeped and dried, then ground and mixed into rice cakes. Similar practices were recorded by ethnologists in remote Japanese villages in the early twentieth century, echoing the methods Den’nai had documented two hundred years earlier.

His attention to Kaga’s regional specialties is particularly remarkable, and in line with his lords’ gastro-political interests. He documents the famous winter sardines of Himi Bay in Kaga with the precision of someone who has sourced and cooked them. He notes with pride that Edo sardines are oilier and plainly inferior. Because Kaga’s fresh produce could not be easily brought elsewhere due to spoilage, Den’nai also records how his lords cultivated local plants at their Edo residence. For example, he talks about them growing a wild sweet-and-sour fruit vine called mube (Stauntonia hexaphylla), which was traditionally offered back in Kaga as tribute from a remote village on the Nōto peninsula. Food was crucial to regional diplomacy and to fending off nostalgia when away from home.

Fig. 2. Sardine Fishing Hut in Himi Bay, Etchu Province, Kaga Domain. In Tabimiyage (Travel Souvenirs) by Kawase Hasui (1920). Image courtesy of Japan National Diet Library Digital Collections

What the Ryōri Mugonshō preserves, in the end, is the full texture of how culinary knowledge moved in premodern Japan: through conversations with producers and merchants, through fieldwork and reading, through sourcing and experimentation. Den’nai’s personal collection was a working archive of messy and encyclopedic (yet professional) learning. Yet it only received public recognition 250 years after his death, when local historians unearthed and published some of his writings. Scholars today praise Ryōri Mugonshō for offering a nuanced, everyday view of premodern Japanese food, and Den’nai’s life even inspired the 2012 period drama Bushi no Kondate (A Samurai’s Menu). Ryōri Mugonshō is a reminder of how much knowledge can live in the unofficial record; that is what makes it feel genuinely alive.

 Sources and Recommended Literature

National Diet Library. “Ryōri Mugonshō [2].” Tokyo: National Diet Library Digital Collections, accessed December 21, 2025.

Nishimura, Shintarō. Kyūchū no Shefu, Tsuru o Sabaku: Edo Jidai no Chōtei to Hōchōdō. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2012.

Osawa, Yoshimi. “Ethnobotanical Review of Traditional Use of Wild Food Plants in Japan.” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 20, no. 1 (2024): 100.

Pilcher, Jeffrey M. “Banquets Against Boredom: Towards Understanding (Samurai) Cuisine in Early Modern Japan.” In Food History: Critical and Primary Sources: Global Contact and Early Industrialization, edited by Jeffrey M. Pilcher and Eric C. Rath. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.

Rath, Eric C. Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

Tō, Tomoko, and Watanuki, Toyoaki. Hōchō-zamurai Funaki Dennai: Kaga Hyakumangoku no Okakae Ryōrinin. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2013.

Watanuki, Toyoaki, ed. Kaga-han Ryōrinin Funaki Dennai Hensanchoshū. Toyama: Katsura Shobō, 2006.

Yoneda, Naofumi. Ryōri Mugonshō: Kaga-han Okakae Ryōrinin Funaki Dennai no Shokuzai Hyakka. Kanazawa: Noto Insatsu Shuppanbu, 2016.

Miguel Ángel Pelayo Prieto, a native of Zamora, Spain, is a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Agriculture at Kyoto University. Miguel’s research focuses on the historical evolution of vanishing wild ingredients in Japanese cuisine from the Edo period to the present, as documented in recipes. He views cuisine as an expression of the relationship between humans and nature (ethnobiological knowledge), integrating historical and ethnological methodologies and emphasizing the reconstruction of the materiality of Japanese culinary culture. This approach aims not only to deepen our understanding of food history but also to revive lost culinary knowledge for use in contemporary cooking. As a former line cook and sous chef, Miguel puts that knowledge into practice through pop-up events.

Mail: mappfgh@gmail.com

Instagram: miguelap8 (personal)/ remapped.recipes (pop-ups)

 

 

Global Exchange, Modern, Series: Japanese Studies, Series: Politics and Propaganda, Series: Wartime Recipes

Meals on Wheels: The “Kitchen Cars” and American Recipes for the Postwar Japanese Diet

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By Nathan Hopson

From 1956 to 1960, the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) sponsored a fleet of food demonstration buses in Japan (“kitchen cars”) to improve national nutrition and fuel the nation’s economic recovery with more “modern” and “rational” cooking methods and, most importantly, ingredients (i.e. American agricultural surpluses: wheat, corn, soy, and to a lesser extent meat, dairy, etc.) The concept was first floated to the US by Dr. Ōiso Toshio, chief of the health ministry’s nutrition section, 1953-1963. Along with the school lunch program instituted under the US occupation, the kitchen cars became one of the most important tools for marketing American farm products in Japan. The school lunch program, centered on bread and (reconstituted skim) milk until the 1970s, taught young Japanese new tastes. The kitchen cars taught their mothers to reproduce those flavors at home.

The initial fleet of a dozen buses, operated by the Japan Nutrition Association (a semiprivate organ of the health ministry), reached over two million people in towns, villages, and apartment blocks across Japan. The nutritionists staffing the buses put their professional imprimatur on the many novel foods they demonstrated, and distributed samples, nutritional pamphlets, and the day’s recipes to their audiences of mostly housewives. The kitchen cars were wildly popular. When US funding expired, local Japanese governments built their own to meet public demand; the number exceeded 100 by the end of the 1960s. Though it is difficult (impossible?) to quantify, the kitchen cars contributed in subtle but profound ways to transforming the postwar Japanese diet.

Despite their popularity at the time, today the kitchen cars are mostly forgotten. When they are remembered, it is mostly for destroying “traditional” Japanese dietary patterns and contributing to the “Westernization” of the diet during the period of high economic growth. This backlash stems in part from the fact that American financing was hidden not just from the public, but also from all those who staffed or assisted with the kitchen cars. Still, in the short run, these buses were a win-win for the US and Japan. America’s Cold War “Food for Peace” campaign put agricultural surplus to work supporting a critical ally, and Japan received enormous amounts of free or cheap food and generous development loans.

Figure 1: Kitchen car demonstration in rural Aomori, year unknown (probably 1950s). Courtesy of the Aomori Prefectural Museum.

The photo above shows a typical scene from a day in the life of the kitchen car. The audience crowds around the back of bus, which opens up like a thrust stage for the nutritionists to perform upon. The gathered women listen intently, some taking notes. The kitchen installed in the rear of the bus is the state-of-the-art chrome and gadgetry emblematic of the new postwar “bright life” of happy consumerism. The nutritionists in their white lab coats bring the authority of science. The foods they are preparing may not seem like the stuff of American farm surplus propaganda, but as Ōiso himself observed, “Propaganda is truly effective when people don’t notice it.”[1] To wit, the noodles are most likely soba: buckwheat mixed with (American) wheat. Even subtler is the use of sautéing, undoubtedly in (American) corn or soy oil. This kind of gradualist approach, expressed in slogans such as “Flour-based food once a day,” helps explain both why nobody suspected American involvement and why the kitchen cars were so popular and effective.

Few detailed records of 1950s’ kitchen car menus remain, but those that do are consistent with accounts from the 1960s. A list of favorites from mid-decade Okayama prefecture includes milk donuts, udon stew, sautéed amaranth leaves with liver, fried meat and vegetables with ketchup, vegetable cream soup, fried soybean fritters, chicken and peanuts in tomato sauce, bok choy with peanuts and mushrooms, and cheese sponge cake. Roughly simultaneously, the prefecture’s public health center sponsored competitions for original, tasty, nutritious, economical foods (about ¥20 each) using ingredients like soy, skim milk, and flour. Winners included vegetable omelets, fried tofu-wrapped sardines, fried sardine balls, and mysterious entries such as “nutritional bread” and “nutritional fried dumplings.”

These lists lend credence to the remarks of Richard Baum, Ōiso’s initial American collaborator. In a 1978 documentary, Baum expressed immense satisfaction at the kitchen cars’ success. As he explained, “the housewives would come out and gather around and learn how to make different wheat foods. And then they would get to sample the wheat foods. And they found these very delicious and so they would say ‘Oishii desu. Mō sukoshi’ [This is delicious. A little more, please].”[2]

[1] Quoted in Takashima Teruyuki, Amerika komugi senryaku: Nihon shinkō (Ie no Hikari Kyōkai, 1979), 106.

[2] Quoted in Takashima Teruyuki, Shokutaku no kage no seijōki: kome to mugi no sengoshi (NHK, 1978).

This post is part four in an ongoing series by Hopson on the history of nutrition in modern Japan. You can read his previous post here. This entry is based on his article “Ingrained Habits: The ‘Kitchen Cars’ and the Transformation of Postwar Japanese Diet and Identity.” Food, Culture & Society, November 2020.

19th Century History, Series: Japanese Studies, Series: Newspapers and Advertisements, Series: Rice

Very Frugal Ways to Cook Rice—Famine Prevention and Common Knowledge in Edo Japan

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By Joshua Schlachet

If you’ve browsed The Recipes Project in the past several weeks, you may have raised an eyebrow at the unfamiliar black and white squiggles that decorate the top of our page (written, by the way, in a cursive form of premodern Japanese). As my October editorial duties slowly draw to a close, I couldn’t let the month go by without spoiling the mystery of this little recipe collection…of sorts…as economical in its prose as in its outlook.

Consisting of a single broadsheet (what you see above is the whole thing), Very Frugal Ways to Cook Rice (Daikenyaku meshi no takiyō), was likely produced around the time of Japan’s Great Tenpō Famine in the 1830s as a no-nonsense guide to help households squeeze a little more out of their staple grains. Rice prices could fluctuate wildly from season to season in time of scarcity, and to the extent that ordinary people could afford to eat (usually brown) rice at all, cutting it with cheaper vegetables and coarse grains became a strategy for survival.

Very Frugal Ways of Cooking Rice. Photo courtesy of the Waseda University Library Digital Collection of Historical Japanese Books.

Very Frugal Ways to Cook Rice was one of many vernacular publications—meant to help regular folks combat famine conditions—that circulated through the vibrant marketplace for commercial print during Japan’s Edo period (1600-1868). If it wasn’t given away for free, it was available for cheap, meaning a family could likely recoup what little they spent on the pamphlet itself in as little as a single meal. This was no small claim for those in need, and economizing became both a key premise in enduring food shortages and a central feature of every recipe listed here. 

What are the Very Frugal Ways to Cook Rice? The guide “instructs” readers on how to prepare rice seasoned and combined with a variety of inexpensive beans, roots, grains, and leaves, similar to the contemporary Japanese dish takikomi gohan. Each recipe indicates the proper proportions (five parts rice to four parts barley, for example) and basic directions for foods like barley, sweet potato, tofu lees, fava beans, millet, daikon radish, carrots, cow peas, red beans, as well as two kinds of “very economical” porridge that could stretch rice even further. Based on which ingredient one mixed in, a household could save a hefty thirty to eighty mon (a common denomination of copper coinage) on ten portions, a significant sum worth as much as $10 to $25 in today’s currency.

Contemporary image of Japanese mixed, seasoned rice (takikomi gohan). Photo courtesy of Ajinomoto Park.

Yet one thing continues to bug me about these very frugal recipes: why go through the trouble to teach people what they already knew? The directions themselves are so simple and intuitive as to border on obvious: cook beans, mix with rice; cut potatoes into chunks, mix with rice; boil leaves, season, mix. What’s more, families likely prepared such dishes in their homes already, making Very Frugal Ways redundant knowledge that didn’t bear repeating. Barring anything earth shattering within the recipes themselves, communicating frugality was itself the point. In a society where rice was not only the staple food but the basic unit of taxation and exchange, where running out signaled destitution, economizing as a lesson was worth reproducing the same old recipes, even if everyone already knew what was on the menu.