Sushi: an Origin Story
I have been spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about my desire to eat sushi for every meal and my sadness that I’m not eating it for every meal. As such, seems a good time to look into where this gem of a food category got started! This also, weirdly, fits into fermenting (unlike the vast majority of origin stories I feel like writing), because the OG sushi was fermented for around a year.
Let’s get started!
Narezushi
Sushi in its original form was called narezushi. This was made by skinning and gutting fish, salting them heavily, let them ferment for a few months, and then scraping off all the salt, stuffing the fish with rice, weighing it all down, and then fermenting it for a year. Once done, the rice was removed and just the fish was eaten. This is still made today, but the process is a bit different and shorter now, and includes the use of vinegar to hasten the souring of the fish.
This, however, didn’t necessarily come from Japan. It comes from somewhere in Southeast Asia, but no one is 100% sure where exactly that was. What we do know is that the Chinese claim the first recorded mention of it, somewhere in the 3-5th century BCE range, and then gets its own Chinese character in the 2nd-century CE. The prevailing theory currently is that it initially occurred in various rice paddies along the Mekong River (Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam) as a means of preserving all the fish that came and got stranded during floods.
Why waste the food that so graciously showed up just for you to nom out on, amirite?! Keep in mind, also, that various colonial and trade missions in the region is why it spread all over the place in the early days to elites, despite this initially being viewed as a peasant food. Either way, there are long-standing traditions of this food in a bunch of current-day nations, including China, Korea, and Japan.
Although this is a preparation still found in Thailand and some parts of China, it largely fell out of favor in China by the time the Japanese got really into it. From what I can tell, there are two prevailing theories on how this food got to Japan.
Theory 1 (the more popular)
It’s believed that Japan got narezushi around the 9th-century, as Buddhism began to spread further around the region.
Theory 2 (seems more likely to me)
It’s also believed that during the Nara era (710-794 CE), merchants brought it along with them. This seems most likely to me primarily because there are some written records extolling the awesomesauce that is sushi (or narazushi, rather). It was awesome enough, apparently, that you could pay imperial taxes with it.
Either way, this was only available to the upper-class, and primarily used the type of carp (goldfish) that was found in Lake Biwa, until the 15th-century. At that time, it began to trickle down to more common folk.
Legit, I was going to look for a video showing y’all how to make this if you feel like it, but I find this guy’s speech patterns too delightful to not share this video instead.
Namanare
During the latter period above, namanare is developed, which is partially-fermented fish that’s encased in rice and eaten that way while fresh. This is kind of like rolls, except without all the wrapping and still involves fermentation. This is a new dish for Japan, because it entirely changes the structure of what zushi is at this time by transforming this type of fermented fish into something created for flavor rather than specifically for preservation. Both dishes are still served, so you know. This was also available to common folk, as that shift happens here in the Kitayama portion of the Muromachi period.
As you can see, this type of sushi really just doesn’t need a lot of explanation. It’s fresh fish and fresh rice.
Haya-zushi
Y’all are probably already at least passingly familiar with the Edo period in Japan, because this period is super popular in film and television due to the development of an astonishingly massive group of elite warriors called the Samurai. This is the period of the shogunate, and is characterized by its stability, rigid social order, the explosion of growth in the arts and intellectual ideas, class- and trade-determined educational programs, and extraordinarily national isolationism.
It’s also the period that freshER sushi was developed. Fast, easy, delicious, and took off like your best horse will! What you need to know about this sushi is that it’s still not made the way we’re used to seeing it done in restaurants. In this version, you layer your fish (and any veggies, if using) onto your rice and then you press it for up to a day. Vinegar was also added, so you didn’t need to ferment to get that delicious sour flavor from your fish. Relative to what they’d been doing, this is fast. Really, really fast. That’s why it’s called what it is: the name means “fast sushi.”
This is also when people have the ability to open restaurants specific to this food. It’s a real nightmare, I would imagine, to try to start a business selling daily meals of a fish that takes a year to ferment. Obviously don’t know, but it was in the early 17th, though when Matsumoto Yoshiichi, from Edo (Tokyo) opened the first one.
Near as i can tell, this is Matsumoto Yoshiichi. Someone please tell me if I botched this. Seriously. If I’m wrong, please email me straight away and say so, otherwise I can’t correct it.
Edo-Mai and Nigiri-zushi
These develop pretty closely together, both in the early 19th-century. Basically what’s going on here is that in Tokyo (then Edo), there were lots and lots of fires due to how densely people were packed into this city, and they had an impressively efficient and destructive method of handling it: they simply knocked all the houses down.
I feel like Ross would’ve been really keen on being part of this, because he likes to smash things if given a socially appropriate manner in which to do so. He occasionally does some side work smashing and rebuilding things, which he seems to enjoy a lot when it happens. Not gonna pretend any of this makes sense to me, but those of you who’re also smashers will identify with his desire to be in on the house smashing game, I’m sure.
Because of all this smashing, you had a lot of workers milling about (probably also the newly homeless) who needed some food to eat. Remember, y’all: no refrigeration yet. And fish. Fast food zushi stalls are popping up left and right, and this is the birth of Japanese street food culture! I love street food in ways I don’t know how to describe. What are some of y’all’s favorites? This debuted in circa 1820, brought to us by one of my favorite historical figures, Yohei Hanaya.
Edo-mai (Edo/Tokyo-style) and nigiri are basically the same thing and are mainly differentiated by size.
Nigiri I assume y’all know. It’s the seasoned rice with fish (usually) on top. Sometimes cooked, sometimes not. Depends on what you order, really. Modern nigiri is always meant to be eaten in one bite; edo-mai not so much. Stuff is bigger, y’all, and is meant to be eaten not in one bite.
Is that cheese right there on the top right corner? Or is it egg? Why are there never these gloriously ginormous hunks of whatever yum that is on my plates?
Rolls
These are post-refrigeration new. What happens here is that the world becomes a much more efficient global economy, where highly perishable foodstuffs can be literally flown to the other side of the world. This is important for a lot of foods, but it really is a game changer for anything involving fish (and a few other items).
Suddenly, sushi isn’t common fare any more. It’s in demand, expensive, and all over the world. Due to all these goings on, someone in the 1960s decided it would be more efficient to make a bunch of pieces all at once. Thus, the roll is born! You simply layer all your jazz onto your nori, roll that bad boy up, slicey-slicey, arrange prettily and move onto the next order. The inside out roll, where the rice is on the outside? That was actually developed in Los Angeles during the ‘60s! I had no idea there was a lot of interest in America in this wonder-food until research this, so that’s also really exciting for me personally.
The first American sushi restaurant, opened by Noritoshi Kanai and his partner Harry Wolff, was called Kawafuku Restaurant. It was in Little Tokyo, and it became popular quickly. By the 70s, sushi restaurants spread to other parts of LA, and it just went along from there.
Conveyor belt sushi restaurants, far less surprisingly, also come from America. These peaked in the 80s, but I’ve noticed in the last 5 or so years that they’ve been seeing a resurgence, particularly in areas where lots of workers will be lunching. I won’t pretend I don’t love a quick conveyor belt lunch every now and again, and I look forward to when I’m eating at restaurants again!
In the ‘80s, automation comes along and you start seeing mass produced sushi. This was also quite popular, though not particularly long-lived due to changing health trends making automated foods less desirable to the average consumer.
These days, you can pretty much find sushi of some kind or another everywhere, including the grocery store. I learned recently that in some situations (you look like you really don’t know what snack you wanted to eat), you may be offered the option to have what you want made for you if they have the ingredients to do it. Didn’t know that before and didn’t utilize it, but something to keep in mind.
Our final video is a really cool tutorial on how to make modern sushi at home! He’s pretty comprehensive and gives a lot of pro-tips.
