Summer holidays!!
The other day I was at the supermarket with my partner. After picking up some vegetables, yogurt and some household things, we walked over to the sweets corner. Amidst the senbei rice crackers and mochi rice cakes we found a pack of warabi mochi, a transparent dumpling made from bracken-starch served cold in summer, sprinkled with sweet roasted soy bean flour and with brown sugar syrup over it. She used to eat it often when she was a child, and so, feeling a bit nostalgic, we picked up a pack and headed to the cash register.
The next day, with a typhoon heading towards Kansai, having spent the whole day comfortably at home, I served up the warabi mochi in two bowls with glasses of cold green tea for a snack. Sweet and delicious, we talked about other things she used to eat when she was a child, when she would make up this or that at home with her mother.
Nostalgia - fond memories from the past. Our talk made me recall a memory from not quite so long ago as my childhood, but a long time ago nevertheless, when we were living together in Canada for half a year... some sixteen years ago now. We were staying at my mother's home over the Christmas holidays, a cottage home in the quiet, all but deserted woods of Sharbot Lake, a tiny town near Ottawa, Canada's capital. My mother and younger sister had driven to New York City to celebrate New Years there, leaving the house to the two of us. Playing our music, reading books, watching movies at night, playing in the snow outside, it was a wonderful week.
New Years day came, and my partner went to make something in the kitchen. When I took a look I saw a Japanese package on the counter with a picture of small white glutinous balls: shira-tama, little dumplings made of rice powder. New Years, the biggest holiday in Japan, and these days my favourite holiday, even more than Christmas (which is saying something, since I so loved Christmas as a child!). New Years in Japan, along with the years first visit to the local shrine, and perhaps a New Years money gift for children, is all about food. Osechi, a great feast of all kinds of food kept in a big decorative box to be eaten over a few days to bring in the new year, and mochi rice cakes served with vegetables in miso soup or in a thick soup of sweet red beans called zenzai. Food all hard to come by in Canada - impossible, really - but my partner had brought from Japan a package for making shira-tama dumplings, a close substitute for mochi rice cakes, and a can of sweet red beans, just enough to make two bowls of zenzai.
We brewed up a pot of green tea and took our bowls of zenzai to the dining room table. The view from the windows, outside all white with snow, the two of us warm and cozy inside, warmed all the more by the green tea and hot bean soup, it is one of my favourite memories from our time in Canada. That holiday I was immersed in reading a book by the old Japanese writer Kafu Nagai called Geisha in Rivalry (腕くらべ), a nostalgic story of geisha living in the old geisha quarters of Tokyo, competing against each other for the patronage of customers, and after our bowls of shira-tama zenzai I went happily back to the living room to continue, my mind and heart drifting all the way back to Japan on a full stomach and good story.
Today's warabi mochi, those translucent dumplings, recalled that winter afternoon of zenzai with soft white shira-tama dumplings in Canada. It is interesting how food can hold memories like this - its smell, its taste recalling a time long, long ago, with the same smell, the same taste, or perhaps even a different food, but filled with the same emotion. Love, more than any other emotion, creates such memories, memories that stay so clearly in our hearts for years and years, to surface surprisingly, all of a sudden, when the same emotion comes along, like it did today.
(On a dog walk in Sharbot Lake, Ontario, Canada, where we were staying that Christmas)
