37 KiB
narrator, subject, facilitator, date, approved, summary, location, topics, links
| narrator | subject | facilitator | date | approved | summary | location | topics | links | |||||||||
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| Sonoko Sakai | Home cooking | Nathan Schneider | 2025-10-16 | 2026-01-16 | An award-winning cookbook author and teacher describes her culinary upbringing in Japan, Mexico, and the United States. | Los Angeles, CA |
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To begin, could share how you introduce yourself?
I usually introduce myself to my students. That's basically my main audience, and I just say, "Hi! Thanks for coming to my workshop, and today I'm going to be teaching you how to make noodles." Or "Let's take a walk up in the garden and see what we can find, so we can cook with it during the class." I try to engage from the moment I see them, and I'm a curious person. I want to meet and get to know everybody. I ask a lot of questions.
Are these workshops at your home? You mentioned the garden.
Since the pandemic, I've been doing a lot of the workshops from my house and my kitchen studio. I like working from home so I don't have to drag things. I used to put everything in my car and go to all these places, but I don't enjoy it that much. I try to work from home as much as I can.
You've had a long and interesting journey toward where you are, toward holding this space in your home. You worked in education and in film. Describe how you came to where you are, and how the food thread in particular worked its way through your life.
I have this motto---cooking always begins and ends in the garden. Since I was a little girl, I loved being in the garden with my grandmother, and cooking, finding something to cook with, and then bringing it back, and eating it together. That's always been my favorite pastime.
I wanted to go into education because I grew up in many different places. My father was an airline executive, and he was one of the first employees to be transferred overseas from Japan after the war, and I was one of the first American-born children, in a family of five siblings. I was brought up multiculturally---Japanese, American, and Mexican. We traveled a lot, so I wanted to do something with my experience. I thought, "Well, I speak at least two languages. I could go into education or maybe I could become a diplomat, maybe work for the UN." I had these big dreams of doing something to save the world.
But every time I tried to get into---I was working for the Foreign Ministry in Japan as an intern, and they said, "Don't bother trying to get in. The exams are really hard. Why don't you just marry a diplomat?" A female diplomat said, "It's not really worth it, because if you're a female, you're going to end up serving tea." I got really discouraged.
But then I thought, "Okay, I'm interested in education, so I will get my credentials." I got my teaching credentials. Then I got my master's, and I went as far as starting my PhD in education---bilingual and multicultural education at UCLA. But my parents said, "We're not paying for grad school. You have to figure out how to pay, because we have four other kids to send to school." So I started working for the film department, and I met an incredible professor, Lou Stillman, who took me under his wings, and he opened me up to seeing the world from a different perspective. He had a library of books and photography. He had an incredible collection of work by Ansel Adams. He knew Ansel Adams. He took me down to Carmel to have lunch with him, and I started getting into the art world while I was trying to be a grad student, and I realized I wasn't having that much fun in education. It was like an ivory tower for me. I enjoyed being with the students; I was a substitute teacher in Englewood, which is a Latino-Black neighborhood near the airport, and that part was really fun. But the academic part in education was just a little bit dry for me.
When I started working for Lou Stillman as a darkroom assistant, I said, "Well, I wonder if I could do something with words and pictures." English was never my first language. It was always my second language, but Japanese was not quite my first language either, because we kept moving around, and Spanish became another mother tongue-like language, because we lived in Mexico for four years. I was always being uprooted, and I had a sink or swim kind of education. I wanted to see how to integrate words and pictures in English so I could say what I want to say.
Lou said, "Well, Sonoko"---because I would cook for him a lot---"why don't you just write about your love for food?" He guided me, and he even found me a publisher. For the first book I did, called The Poetical Pursuit of Food, he was the editor, and he found a publisher. This is this UCLA professor who had two Oscars. He was a documentary filmmaker. His photos were in the Museum of Modern Art, and he had this incredible collection of photos that I got to hold. He said, "I'll help you write the cookbook. Let's just write." I had this old Olivetti typewriter with broken keys, missing the A or B or whatever it was.
It took a long time. But in two and a half years, I guess, and then three years to get it published, and I found a voice through cooking, and I became a little more confident in the language. But then I didn't think I could make a living just being a darkroom assistant. I dropped out of graduate school and I went and looked for a real job working as a gopher for a producer in film.
That's how I got into film, and it was horrible. They were very abusive people. Here I was as a production assistant, having to answer like eight calls at once. It was a really high-pressure job, but I eventually transitioned into an international sales company for films.
Actually, I just saw my old boss again---his name is Lenny Shapiro. I hadn't seen him in at least twenty years, and he called me out of the blue. He's eighty-four years old, and he says, "Sonoko, let's have lunch!" I couldn't believe it. Lenny had a company called Shapiro Entertainment, and he helped people like James Cameron, who---he helped him with Piranha, which is one of Cameron's first films. Shapiro gave him a job. He couldn't even pay rent. He was doing the illustrations for Shapiro, and there I was, like a little secretary, answering phones.
I started seeing this indie world of filmmaking. It was fascinating. Here's words and pictures, but very low, like B-level, underground movies. But some of them were really good, and some were art films, and even some were leaning more towards porno, and action-adventure, and low-budget films. I started going to Cannes and to the film markets.
Here I was, a dropout of graduate school, but I was starting to find myself in the film world as a sales agent. I started meeting people from all over the world and selling movie rights. These were movies that were made under a million dollars. Every poster that James Cameron made, and he made a few, were like exaggerated action and sexy girls. I said, "That's not even in the movie!" and he would say, "It's okay, it looks good." I met people from all over the world, and became engaged in different cultures, and I also got to taste a lot of different foods. I would go to Cannes, I would go to Milan, and Venice, and London, and I was always trying the food.
Going to these film markets for me was all about eating. The first thing I would do is go to the farmer's market in the morning, just to check out the local scene. I was more interested in that than trying to make a deal with some film distributor. That became my path for almost twenty years. I started in the eighties, and I finished in 2010.
I did quite well as a film seller, and then I became a buyer. The Japanese distributor came, and when he found out I was bilingual, he wanted to recruit me as his eye for films around the world. I became like the antenna for an independent distributor. Then I got recruited by another company. I had special skills, because I could speak several languages. I had the communication skills.
Working for a Japanese distributor means you're helping them not just find really good movies, but you're also working in publicity. Journalists come from Japan, and you have to do interviews with the movie stars, and you have to feed them. It was always important to feed them best food. I was always in search of the hottest restaurant, and I had a nice expense account.
I had gone from a B-level, low-budget, no-budget place, to working for a very good Japanese distributor. All the producers wanted to work with this company I worked for. That was good, because they spoil you. They wine and dine you. I developed the palate for good food.
I think I told you that Lou Stillman helped me publish my first book. It happened while I was transitioning jobs. I left him, and my book came out. I started working for Lenny Shapiro, and Lenny was so nice, he bought all these books for me and gave them as Christmas and Hanukkah presents. But the book flopped. Nobody wanted to buy this book, even though it was Clarkson and Potter at Random House, which is a really good publisher, even today. But it was too esoteric. No photos. Japanese home cooking, in 1984---people weren't cooking Japanese food at home. They were going to the restaurants, right? Eating sushi, and things like that.
I was a little too early. I was saying, "Well, okay, I'm in film now, but I still really want to do something with food," so I started writing. The LA Times and New York Times had the food section on Wednesdays, and it was a very thick section. I love the food section. That was why I was buying the newspaper, basically.
I liked this one editor at the LA Times, Russ Parsons, and he was writing something about Japanese food, so I made a comment about it. He wrote back to me and said, "I know you! You published that book, and I reviewed it when I was working for a paper in New Mexico." He says, "Why don't you write for us? Just write anything you want." He became my editor. First it was Lou, and then I had Russ, and Russ was a really hard one. I didn't think I was going to get paid. I didn't ask for any payment. But they paid me a dollar a word. I would occasionally contribute, and it was really interesting to see my stories get published in the LA Times.
Years went by, and I was busy raising my son. It wasn't like I wasn't doing anything in food, and I kept in touch with the publisher of the first cookbook. Whenever I went to New York to do some interviews for a film, I would contact her, and we would have lunch, and we became friends. But she would not publish my next cookbook. She said, "You're not a TV personality, and you're not a chef. We don't know how to market you." I said, "Well, I cook at home. My cooking is home cooking." She says, "Yeah, but how do you sell a book if people don't know who you are?"
So I just kept doing what I was doing. I went from being a buyer for a Japanese film company to an indie producer. The owner of the company I worked for decided to sell the company, so he gave me a one-year severance, and in that one-year time, I managed to find a producing gig, so I produced a couple of movies. They were big movies, and I actually raised a lot of money. The first one was called Silk, and it had Keira Knightley in it. She really liked the script and decided to do this movie that had almost no dialogue. The movie flopped, and then I found another project to produce called Blindness.
I don't know if you've heard of José Saramago---he won the Nobel Prize for this, for a series of books that he had done. It's about an epidemic of blindness, very similar to COVID. Everybody got blind except for the eye doctor's wife. Julianne Moore played her. We shot it in Brazil with an international cast. So I had my moments of being a producer. People in Hollywood would call me and say, "Let's go and have lunch, talk about your project."
That lasted for a little while. The movie was at the Cannes Film Festival, and then it opened during the week the market crashed---the 2008 market crash. It was a major distribution by Miramax and Disney, but it flopped, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua won. Our movie died because nobody wanted to see a dark movie, and they mismarketed it. It's not a bad movie. The director is Fernando Meirelles, he's Brazilian, and he did City of God. Beautiful. I really love the director, and we're such good friends. But it just didn't work.
Because of market crash, I went into debt. I had put up all my producing fee as a collateral for the film, and when the market crashed, there was no money. I came out with a debt of a quarter million---$250,000 in debt, and I didn't know what to do.
I was trying to do another project. I had even gotten the rights for it, but it was too dark. I don't know why, but I was picking all these dark films. It was about a Michelin chef who committed suicide. He thought he was gonna lose his third star, and he committed suicide. It's a very dark story. Here I was, I had the rights for it, and I just couldn't get the script right. I worked on it for seven years, and it didn't work. It was too dark. The author wanted to do the screenplay, so I let him do it, but he just couldn't make it happen, and I couldn't make it happen. So I decided, "Well, maybe I just need to transition---I need to leave the business. It's time." I was in my early fifties.
I said, "Well, what am I gonna do? If there was a hole, I should just jump in it and bury myself"---because the movie flopped, which means my investors lost money. But movies flop all the time. I would say 80 percent of movies don't make money. You could write that off, but I was like, "What am I gonna---do I have to sell my house?" I did. But actually my loan was forgiven. I managed to figure it out. I was able to find enough expenses, and my genius Japanese accountant figured out how to basically write it off. But then the loan turned into income, and I owed taxes, so I had to figure that one out. I did. After the market crash, I think everybody struggled, right? Everybody lost homes. I had a really nice house in Santa Monica, but I ended up selling it and downsizing.
I said, "Well, what am I gonna do? Maybe I could go into food." More for therapeutic reasons, I went into making noodles. I just wanted to learn how to make noodles. My parents thought I lost my mind---"That's a lowly job, going to some noodle shop and learning how to make noodles from a noodle master. That's not what you should do. You're one of the first female producers who has made a international film. Why don't you just carry on?" I said, "It's not that easy. The market is dried up right now." Streaming came later, right? We were just in that in-between period of five to ten years where you didn't know where you were going. An indie producer just doesn't have the financing to keep it going, so I decided it was time.
I learned how to make noodles, and I thought that maybe I could teach cooking. That's how I started, teaching at a friend's kitchen. I slowly started building an audience, but it really was starting from zero, and with a beginner's mind. I wasn't planning to open a restaurant. I thought about it, but at my age, nearing mid-fifties, without any money, I couldn't do that.
I said, "Let's see if I can go back to teaching," right? Rather than being in a classroom, I just decided to open up my kitchen. Russ Parsons always told me, "There's one thing missing here---nobody's written a book about Japanese home cooking. Maybe you could do that." I did it. I started doing an onigiri class, and I found a grant that was offered by the Japanese government to promote rice. I took that grant. It was like $300,000, and they told me, "Just go around America. Teach people how to use rice."
I taught how to make onigiri, and I did a book---my second cookbook, a tiny little gifty book about how to make onigiri. Now onigiri is very popular, but again, I was a little too early. It was just a way to get back in. I titled the project Common Grains, because I thought that grains are an ancient food that has tied people together. It has built civilizations. I was approached by scientists and chefs---they were all interesting in what I was doing with my rice and my noodles.
I even started getting invitations from corporations. Google would say, "Hey, come and talk about your cooking." Well, I'm not a chef, I don't know, I could talk about how to make cooked rice, how to make dashi. Yvon Chouinard was really interested in what I was doing. He invited me to the Ventura campus to teach a class, and he joined the class. The Bread Lab in Washington, they approached me and said, "Come and teach a class." I also went to the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, to be part of their grain program, with chefs like Kelly Whitaker, and did pop-ups there. Without having any real background as a chef, I just started building community, and it was very organic. Sometimes I got paid well. Most of the times I didn't.
Then I got approached by the publisher Shambhala. They wanted to republish my old book---which, by then was thirty years old, almost. But then I pitched them a new idea, and they said, "Okay, let's do that one." They were really good. They gave me full range. I went fifty thousand words over the contractual limit. I spent all the money on photography and traveling around. We didn't have a big budget, so I didn't make any money out of it, but it was a great experience.
I'm seventy now, so I'm not young anymore, but I get my Social Security, so all the years I put into film is giving me some security. Working from home keeps it economical. I don't have to pay rent. I still have some really interesting gigs. I'm getting ready to go to Chicago, then Tennessee to a farm. Sewanee, the University of the South---I'm going to teach a class there. We're doing hoshigaki, which is the art of making dried persimmons, onigiri, and miso soup. They're trying to promote their Japanese program. They take students to Japan, and the professor's really interested in getting someone like me out there. Then I'm invited to a lot to Alabama, which is to make a full dinner. I'm expanding my horizons, and they come to me, which is really nice. I'm not trying to say, "Hey, I want a gig," it just happens.
With the most recent book, it's more about fusion---fusing cultures. Japan has a very long history of borrowing.
This is Wafu Cooking?
Yeah, borrowing food from other cultures and adapting it to make it our own. We've done that well with a lot of things---with cars, with cameras, with hardware, with software, and with food especially, like miso and noodles. A lot of things come from China. Curry comes from India, but the English actually brought the powder. I thought that would be a fun subject to explore.
Now I'm doing a book about food as medicine. We're rooted in Chinese medicinal traditions, but we injected a little bit of Japanese folklore, and it's very holistic. It's what people are hungry for right now. It's not analyzing food as some scientific thing, but more from a spiritual---or is it empirical? Ancient people observed how to cure a cold cooking a porridge and serving it with pickled plum, or something like that. I'm trying to introduce those ideas in my next book, and I'm really excited.
I think we need to go back and see what we can learn from nature. Nature is the first pharmacy, and instead of depending so much on all these commercial products, I just want to look at my garden and see what I can learn from it. I'm just coming back to my garden again. It's not easy, because I have to do a lot of research. I'm taking a course in becoming a---it's called yakuzen, and it's a three-thousand-year-old food tradition that's rooted in Chinese medicine. I'm doing an online class in Japanese, and it's so difficult. I have to pass a test---every time I sign on, I'm going, "This is good, this is helping my brain." It keeps me amazingly busy.
What a journey. Could you go back a little bit to the beginning in some respects? You talked about your grandmother and the garden. How did you first learn your way around food? And, in that light, I wonder if you could say a bit about what home cooking means---as opposed to what people might experience of Japanese cuisine in a restaurant.
Americans experience Japanese cooking when they go to a sushi bar or something, right? It's a chef preparing something over the counter, and showing their nice skills, and making it look so perfect with beautiful presentation, but that's not practical for the home cook. Japanese home cooking is kore like Italian---simple, minimal ingredients. If we can eat it raw, we will.
I lived in Mexico for four years and then came back to Japan when I was in fourth grade. We lived with my grandmother, and she gave us the annex. There were five kids living in this two-bedroom little house. My brother got the closet. I had to share a bed with my sister.
My only escape from this crowded situation was to walk across the corridor to my grandmother's house. It was a Shinto shrine that was converted into a house. Very old, old tatami rooms, and a tea room, and a very old kitchen, but she had an oven. She was one of the first people to have an oven. She loved to cook, she loved to grow things in the garden, and she had a beautiful persimmon tree, and a plum tree.
I was following her around and seeing what she did with the things, the food that she harvested. We lived only ten minutes from the ocean, so we would take walks to see the fishermen. We ate locally, and the catch of the day was whatever they caught. When they were bringing in the fishnets and emptying the live fish into buckets, and sorting them out by size, my grandmother was like, "Look, let's get that one. That one looks really good for sashimi. Look at the eye of this one." You see the skin, and make sure nothing was damaged. If they were too little, we'd get a few free ones for our cats and dogs. I got an incredibly tactile education.
My senses were awakened just by hanging out with her, and seeing the food that was growing or being brought in by the fishermen---the seasonality of everything. If it was springtime, the buds of the plum tree were the first ones to appear, and then we would wait. We would sit by the window, sip some tea, and wait for the flowers to come out, and wait for the fruit. With that fruit, we would make pickles. It was a ritual. She did it annually, for decades. She had all these vintages of her pickled plum and plum wine.
That was a foundational education for me---to live seasonally, and close to the land, touching the soil. Instead of refrigerating things, she would bury the scallions back in the soil, and keep it there in that cool, dark place. We would go into the bamboo forest to dig bamboo shoots, or ginger, and mugwort, and then come back and cook them, and make mochi. I got to harvest the bounty of the season and cook with it and eat it. All local.
You didn't go to a grocery store to look at like, olive oil from Italy or jams from France. There was nothing like that. If you wanted jam, my grandma made jam from plums. The meat---you got that from the local butcher. The chicken from the chicken man. If you needed bamboo, there was a bamboo guy who came and sold the bamboo sticks for your laundry. It was a village of artisans. They all had very high skills. I got to observe what they did with their hands, and that's why I really love the engagement of working with your hands. That was my education, I think. It wasn't college. College for me was very confusing, because I didn't understand anything. All those artisans were the people who showed me something.
When I lived in Mexico, too, our housekeepers were really good tortilla makers. They were always cooking something so good. People came and tried to sell us things, and you could see that everything was made by hand. That was in the 1960s. It was a magical period that helped me open my eyes to enrich my palate.
Learning to cook doesn't have to mean going to cooking school, but just being in someone's garden, or being in your favorite person's kitchen, and tasting the foods. That's why I think home cooking is really important---it's the friendship that you have with your mother, or your grandmother, or your neighbor. Treasure that, right? Instead of saying, "Oh, let's just go out and eat, or let's just buy this." Make it! Just put flour and water together with one egg, and you have a pancake, right? I just think that you have to take the time to do that, rather than to get something that's processed.
What has happened to our society today is things became so convenient and processed that we don't do anything. We just rely. We became very passive people, and we just eat and sit and get fat and unhealthy.
I think the millennials are cooking more---because their parents were the ones that opened cans of Campbell's, right? They thought convenience was the best thing. But their kids know that it's not that great, so I get a lot of young people coming to my workshops.
Or, why would you bother mending a hole? But uf we don't do that, we could end up consuming ourselves. We could lose our---our lives. The earth right now is ailing, and that's not just somebody else's business. We are part of the earth, so mending is a great thing, and home cooking is also part of that mending process---we have to go back into our kitchen. Hold that potato in your hand and feel it. That's what I'm trying to teach and learn.
Could you talk a bit about the relationships among these traditions you learned from? You talked about your time in Japan, your time in Mexico. To what extent is it important to retain a kind of coherence in the tradition of a particular culture, and to what extent should we see these as always learning from each other and blending? Do you try to retain that coherence, or do you think that's an impossible task? As you said earlier, so many of these traditions from particular places already come from centuries of interaction.
The whole culinary world is evolving, because things have become so accessible. You can get anything online. If you want to make Moroccan food, you just type in whatever ingredient that you need, and you'll get it tomorrow. Amazon is ready to deliver it to your door. You can get a Moroccan cookbook.
When I was a little girl, you didn't think about that. Maybe we'd have Chinese noodles, but that was as far as it went. What Italian meant to us was going to this little family restaurant, which basically cooked the spaghetti, put on some ketchup, and maybe added bonito flakes on top. I mean, it was a weird combination. Maybe you'd call that fusion today. But the adaptation process can be very clumsy sometimes, and maybe it doesn't work.
There's a famous author, I don't know if you've heard of Diana Kennedy---an English person who spent her life devoted to writing about Mexican cooking. She was a really demanding, difficult person, I hear, and she always wanted to pursue the authenticity of foods. Mexico has a really rich culinary tradition. Same as Japan. She didn't think that you could really adapt to another culture.
But I think we're living in a different world now, especially in America---it's a country of diversity. I mean, some people don't think it should be that way, but it's not a melting pot, like some people say. We're not really melting. I think we're coexisting, cohabitating, and respecting distinct cultures, side by side. Sometimes the fusion can cause confusion. But in the process our palate has become more refined.
When the hidden flavor is miso in my bolognese sauce, and people say, "Why is your bolognese sauce so good?"---do I want to reveal the secret and tell them I added that Japanese ingredient? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe I will insult somebody. But what is authenticity? Am I an authentic American? I used to get questioned, "Where are you from?" I'll say, "Well, I was born here, so I guess I'm American," but then they say, "But where are you really from?"
I don't know what "real" is, but it has bothered me for a long time when people are saying, like, "Go back where you came from." Even when I was trying to write in English, I took a writing class, and I was told, "Well, if you don't feel comfortable in English, why don't you just write it in Japanese?" I said, "But I'm not comfortable in Japanese either! I just have to find my voice."
We're in a very transitional period, coming to terms with transgender people, and all kinds of people, right? We're acknowledging that people need to be themselves, and if they want to be a little bit of both, it's okay. I'm a little Mexican, a little Japanese, American---I did my DNA test, and I found out I have one percent Portuguese! The Portuguese came to Japan in the sixteenth century to introduce guns and bread. My other side is from Kyushu Island, which is the southern island where the tradesmen came. That happened. I am like five percent French-German. That's because, on my mother's side, a great-great-grandfather came from Switzerland to Japan as a silk merchant and met my great-great-grandma. I know that story.
I have to celebrate it, because that's who I am. If you live in America, we are not a homogeneous country in a cultural sense. We're a mixture of cultures, and we have to be open. That's why I hate what's going on right now politically. But I try to be friendly with everyone. It doesn't matter if you're Republican or Democrat or whatever, I have really dear friends who don't necessarily agree with me politically. I feed those people. It's a common ground.
As a food educator, I think I could spend the rest of my life advocating that kind of idea. I almost was not going to do another book anymore. I don't want to write recipes. But recognizing food as medicine is an ancient idea that you can find all over the world. That's how I'm going to connect this time. It's a challenge. I'm terrified now, because I have to study again, but I like it. I like being studious, even though I try to find every excuse to be in the garden or in the kitchen instead of sitting in front of a book.
Say a bit about how you like to teach, especially in light of what you just said about how you don't want to just make more recipes. How do you guide people into building confidence and learning the tools that they need in order to participate in these traditions?
A lot of it is show and tell. I bring a piece of seaweed, and I let them touch it and cook with it. That's why I like these in-person workshops more than the Zoom classes. If I could, I would send them a kit so they could see and have everything in front of them. My method is to get people to engage in every step of the way. That's why it's hands-on everything. It's a little messier, but I think that's how you learn. I want people to take home new, strange ingredients. I want them to take ownership of it. It took me a long time to get used to olive oil, for example. That was not always part of everybody's everyday cooking. But I don't think you even think about it now. It's just there. Soy sauce has become that way, I guess, but the idea of fermentation is not so common, even though it's so good for your gut, which is why I teach classes in making miso and pickles.
I try to teach people about the microbes, the good bacteria, and how that's also connected to the garden. If you go to the garden, right now we're going through a period of transitioning to fall, and we have a tradition in Japan called doyo, which is rooted in Chinese culture, where the earth spirit comes back to the land to regenerate the land. You let it rest. Farmers and people in construction will not till, or start a new construction for eighteen days. They observe and breathe and ground themselves, because the earth is a center, and it's a period of regenerating. These are the kind of ideas that I try to tell people. Show people a different perspective. You can't just talk about the harvest. How do you reciprocate the generosity of the land?
I try to tie that into my cooking. How can we tie everything back to the garden, so that you appreciate what nature gives us? It's not just saying thank you. How can you reciprocate with action? Right now I just spread some seeds for cover crops, so I'm doing my little duty.
When students come to my house, we all go into the garden. I let them pick, and I talk about it, and they can eat the food that I grow. You should see the sparkle in their eyes, and I love that. I love that about teaching.
Are there things that you challenge your students on, or that you challenge your readers on most?
I want to make sure people are respectful of the ingredients, and we try not to waste food. Some people get very selfish sometimes, very territorial with their space, and they don't want to work with another person. I've had to break up fights. I have people crying because they don't get along, and these are all grown-ups. They have to learn. I'm always trying to---to build a sense of community with my cooking.
And by the way, I want you to keep your space clean. I want this table to look exactly how it did when we started. You're not just going to leave all your tools and flour all over the place. Here's the broom. Because if you're not going to clean, somebody else has to do it, and that's probably going to be me. I tell them that, and that's part of the education I got from Japan as a little girl: you always make sure the space is clean so somebody else can use it.
Sometimes you have these cooking classes where they serve you wine, with all these assistants, and then you make a big mess, and you probably didn't really cook anything, right? You paid $200. That's not what my cooking classes are about. The students have to engage every step of the way, because cleaning up is as important as cooking. I'm not asking them to do all the dishes, but at least you can pick up everything and take it to the sink.
It's really important. I find some people are just so inconsiderate, so I just say, "Can you pick that up? Can you make sure you wipe that knife before you leave?" I tell them in advance, "This is how I want the space to look when we're done." It sounds like a judo dojo, but cooking is like that. I love that part.
I'm curious if you've experienced people from, for instance, Japanese culture, "You're not doing this right," or, "You're blending too much." Have you ever had that kind of tension?
Oh, yeah. A really famous chef said, "There's no way you could wafu macaroni and cheese." Wafu means making it Japanese. "That's like blasphemy---you can't do that." I said, "Okay, it's fine if that's how you like to eat your macaroni, do what you want. I'm not trying to impose my values on you." It's just something I've adapted it to to my own palate, and I think it's good, but sometimes you don't want to alter anything. You want to keep it authentic. Italians put on a little olive oil and salt and pepper, a little lemon juice, and that's it. That's fine.
How about experiences where things that you've done have been used in ways that you think kind of violate the spirit of it?
It's hard because I come from a country that really cares about the aesthetics of things---aesthetics, meaning portions and control, not just flavor. Sometimes I feel like Americans, especially, tend to think that the bigger the better. The more on the plate, the better. Pile on the food. That bugs me a lot. I think less is more as my philosophy, but I think Americans tend to think more is better. That leads you eat too much, and you get bigger, right? You don't need that much food. It's wasteful to eat that much food. It's not good for your body. It bugs me when I see that kind of presentation, or that greedy type of eating. But, that's culture, right?
Japanese people like to eat fresh fish. As simple as possible. No sauces---just a little salt, a little lemon, or just a little wasabi and soy. We want to taste the food, we want to taste the fish. Let's just not fuss with nature too much. I notice a lot of chefs pile things on food. They put on all this cheese and salt. The salad I had last week at this new restaurant---it was basically drowning in dressing and so covered garnishes that I felt sorry for the poor vegetable. It's horrible. I can't believe they could run a restaurant like that. But it's not my business, right? I made one little comment, but I hope I didn't hurt the guy. But he needs to learn.
It took you decades to find your way into this calling. For others who are finding their way into a calling of keeping traditions alive, how would you guide them?
What I teach is home cooking, but I also spent time with, like, noodle makers and chefs, Michelin-star level in Japan---even just to go and wash dishes, to see inside of their kitchens, how they maintain their kitchens, how they work with the ingredients. If you want to get a wholesome perspective, you want to have a lot of teachers. You have to be open to learning---it's always about staying open and learning. I get so inspired. I mean, I just shake when I learn something new. It just rejuvenates me.
You need to have that kind of attitude---with anything, right? Be a perennial student. Because otherwise, how can you teach people? Sometimes I feel I am such a lousy cook, I can't believe I'm teaching. I better practice. I have to do this event in Alabama, and I keep practicing my pie dough. I'm practicing! I'm still not happy, so I'm playing with different flours. But you keep at it. I create those occasions as much as possible.