Home-style
Katsumeshi
Katsumeshi — beef cutlet over rice with demi-glace sauce and cabbage
A Kakogawa yoshoku dish of thin-pounded beef cutlet over a shallow bed of rice, topped with demi-glace sauce and boiled cabbage. It is said to have been devised at a postwar diner so it could be eaten easily with chopsticks, and each restaurant now has its own take on the sauce.
- Origin: Hyogo Kakogawa
- About 460 km west of Tokyo
What it's made of
A flattened beef cutlet sits on a bed of rice on a Western-style plate, topped with demi-glace sauce and served with a side of boiled cabbage. The cutlet is pounded thin before frying, giving it a light bite that is easy to eat with chopsticks.
How it's made
Rice is served in a thin layer; beef is pounded flat, breaded, and deep-fried, then placed on the rice and topped with a sweet-savoury demi-glace sauce, with boiled cabbage on the side. Some versions use pork cutlet, chicken cutlet, or shrimp cutlet instead of beef.
Why it took this shape
Soon after the war, when beef cutlet was still a novelty, it is said to have been devised at a local diner as a Western dish that could be eaten casually with chopsticks, without a knife and fork. Other diners reportedly began adding their own touches to the sauce's sweetness, and the dish spread through the city of Kakogawa. Today it appears in many variations from restaurant to restaurant.
Before you go
- How to shop at a supermarketHow to choose prepared foods, sashimi, and packaged sushi, when discount stickers tend to appear, region-only specialties, buying by weight, the checkout and bagging flow, and sampling etiquette at a local supermarket.
- Food for Obon and the harvest moon (tsukimi)A guide to the meat-free shojin ryori and somen served at Obon, and the tsukimi dango offered on the night of the harvest moon.
- At teishoku diners, shokudo, and machi-chukaA guide to the teishoku set-meal format, free rice refills, table placement, and paying at a shokudo-style diner.
Dishes in the same style
- Agonoko UmaniThe roe of egg-bearing flying fish, caught only in early summer, is simmered in stock and soy sauce as an Oki bar snack. Its large grains and dense, sticky texture are prized as a delicacy said to be scarcer even than the fish's flesh.
- Funa MisoCrucian carp is simmered slowly with soybeans for around five hours, then finished in a sauce of red miso and coarse sugar. A freshwater fish dish of the Kiso rivers' lower basin, made with fatty winter carp simmered until the bones soften through.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Also from Hyogo
- AkashiyakiOctopus folded into a batter of wheat flour, jin-ko starch, egg, and dashi, cooked and dipped in a warm broth — Akashi's own take on the round batter-and-octopus dish, distinguished from takoyaki by that broth in place of sauce.
- Ako saltA salt tied to Japan's earliest full-scale commercial saltfields, using the irihama tidal-field method perfected in the Edo period. Controlling seawater with channels and embankments let work continue regardless of the tide, and the method is said to have remained Japan's main salt-making approach for some 300 years.
- Awaji BeefPure Tajima-line cattle raised on Awaji Island, a brand producers founded in 1986 — selected for balance between lean and fat rather than marbling volume, with a small annual output.
- Banshu RamenA distinctly sweet soy broth, said to have taken root among the town's textile-mill workers.
- Banshu Tenobe SomenA document held at Ikaruga-ji temple in Taishi records the word 'saumen' in an entry dated 1418, the oldest known reference to somen in Hyogo. In the Edo period the Ryuno domain formally licensed and encouraged the trade, built on locally grown wheat, the clear Ibo River, and salt from Ako.
- Botan NabeA Tanba-Sasayama hot pot of wild boar and seasonal vegetables simmered in a broth of white and red miso, often finished with a dusting of ground Japanese pepper. Some restaurants are said to arrange the sliced boar meat like the petals of a peony.