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estebanana -> RE: Dispatches from Akune (Mar. 18 2018 13:09:32)
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Akumaki is a rice based food. In Southern Japan akumaki was a food that travelers and samurai would tuck into a bag and walk with. I worry that as it is now, mostly the old ladies are the ones who know how to make akumaki. Kids, they know about Kentucky Fried Chicken. I was shopping in a town 25 minutes North of Akune on Friday afternoon, the city of Izumi. It's known for the crane migration, Izumi is the winter terminal point for tsuru which summer in Mongolia, the gangley birds fly East to escape the cold Mongol winter. I shopped in Izumi and observed the statues and sculptures around town that depict the tsuru bird, but the red and white logo of KFC next to the Nishimuta Super Grocery Outlet was more strident visually. KFC might be the arch enemy of Akumaki, at least in my mind it is.
Akumaki is made by taking a few handfuls of wood ash and putting them in a big pot of water. The pot is brought to boil. A bamboo leaf is filled with half cooked rice and then folded around the rice in way not unlike the fabulous burritos the San Francisco Mission District is famous for. Big fat burros of rice wrapped in wide dark green bamboo leaves, and like the sweet corn tamales I ate in Guatemala that were housed in soft banana leaf exoskeletons. Thus wrapped the akumaki is cooked in the ash water for about five hours. The ash water is a preservative and the akumaki was useful to samurai on the go because it lasted for a few days without refrigeration. Globalism had not delivered KFC to the Satsuma region of Japan in ancient samurai times, the good Southern Colonel had not been born yet.
Akumaki smells of sulfur, it's mild, but the effluvia of an onsen water from deep within our stinky volcanic Earth is distinctly present in akumaki. It's subtle, and to an akumaki lover like myself the learning curve of eating an enjoying akumaki brings the same kind of joy that lovers of certain stinky cheeses experience. Akumaki is is eaten with sugar and yeast, one dips the chunk of akumaki in a bowl of sugar and kinako yeast, buen provecho.
I left my camera at the shop or I would show a picture of this rare delicacy and ancient food. Akumaki is as old as Roman garum, fish sauce, and I get a thrill out of eating the ancient foods of any culture. Garum is probably best experienced by moderns by buying a bottle of Vietnamese fish sauce at the grocery. I love some new Roman fish sauce and spring onions in my omelet. And I hope the akumaki is still being made in fifty years, a hundred years; If KFC were to sink into a bottomless marsh of garum and crane poo, I for one would not be offended.
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