Miso on the Mind

Last month my wife Ashley and I went to visit some old friends who are living in Japan. We had never visited Asia before, and I’m ashamed to admit that neither of us had been very curious about Japan prior to making the trip, which, given that we were just dazzled by the country and its culture from the moment the plane landed, seems to suggest a pitiful lack of imagination. But while Ashley and I were mutually awe-struck by Japan’s temples, gardens, art, architecture, nightlife, shopping, and amazing public transport, the one aspect of the trip upon which we didn’t quite see eye-to-eye was the food.

While she is not a picky eater, Ashley does feel that when it comes to the dinner table, a good fish is a cooked fish and, preferably, does not arrive still in possession of its head, bones, skin, scales, or visible signs of life. So she went into this trip with certain trepidation in the dining department, and a box of Zone bars in her carry-on bag. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that she found Japanese breakfasts of miso soup, seaweed, fermented soybeans, fish larvae, and the like a bit of a challenge. And the less said about the whole-pickled-octopus-on-a-stick the better. On the other hand, being quite keen on unfamiliar foodstuffs, I couldn’t get enough and consequently found myself eating for two on more than one occasion.

Much to my wife’s dismay I have returned home with a souvenir cookbook and a newfound fever for cooking Japanese food that has yet to wane. Before the jetlag had worn off I had found my way to fantastic Vinh Phat Asian market on Baton Rouge’s Florida Boulevard—returning with soba noodles and miso paste and dashi flakes and wakame seaweed—and have been subjecting her and our confused, hungry children to my culinary experiments with uneven results. While we’ve seen some limited success with things like chicken miso ramen soup, it’s safe to say that everyone will be relieved when Thanksgiving arrives to put a familiar, American roast turkey back on the table.

As much as I’ve come to appreciate the taste of fermented soybean products, there will never be anything more enjoyable to cook than a Thanksgiving turkey. I adore the whole, days-long ritual of the thing: the selecting of the turkey; the brining; the getting up at four in the morning to make the stuffing; the basting with wine and stock every twenty minutes; the resting and the carving and the eating and the drinking of all that milk punch. And the lying on the floor afterwards, sure that you’ll never eat again. It’s my favorite holiday, and after ten or twelve years of being in charge of the turkey we’ve gotten fairly sure of ourselves. It seems time, in other words, to try something new.

Because you see, we’ve got this pizza oven—a huge, wood-burning firebrick and mortar pile the size of a Japanese apartment that dominates our backyard. Wide open it cooks at a thousand degrees, consumes a cord of wood at a time, and in the hands of the uninitiated is capable of reducing four perfectly good pizzas to charcoal in four minutes flat. But on a chilly fall day it’s fun to fire it up, invite a few friends around, and let everyone experiment with cheese and topping combinations until no one can eat another thing. After a decade of doing it, we can produce reliable pizza; but besides baking bread from time to time, we’ve never really upped the ante. Which obviously, the act of consigning the Thanksgiving turkey to the flames would achieve in spades.

Once in the New Yorker magazine I read a personal history written by a foreign correspondent named Jane Kramer, who related her adventures cooking authentic Thanksgiving dinners while living in exotic corners of the world (try finding cranberries in Yemen, for example). While visiting friends living at an ancient Tuscan villa over Thanksgiving, Kramer described watching the host cook a turkey in the five-hundred-year-old, wood-burning bread oven that was the villa’s sole cooking appliance. Apparently the technique involved stuffing the turkey with herbs and fruit, slathering it with olive oil, then shoving it into the white-hot oven in a heavy cast iron covered dish. Every fifteen minutes or so Kramer’s host would risk his eyebrows to lift the lid and fling a cupful of white wine over the bird, until the point when it emerged golden brown, crisp of skin, and redolent with the heady aroma of success. Poetic license on the part of the author? Possibly. Inspiring? Absolutely. And if it all goes wrong … would anyone care for a bowl of turkey miso ramen soup?