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Kukitachiboshi no Nimono
Kukitachiboshi no nimono — sun-dried brassica greens simmered with fried tofu
Kukitachi, a brassica green, is boiled and sun-dried for four or five days into a keeping food, then rehydrated and simmered with fried tofu and shirataki. Put up against a winter with no fresh greens, it is a home side dish handed down in the Okitama and Murayama areas.
- Origin: Yamagata Yonezawa
- About 250 km north of Tokyo
Lineage
What it's made of
This Yonezawa-area dish simmers kukitachi-boshi, a leafy brassica sun-dried for four to five days, together with fried tofu, konnyaku, and pressed soybeans (uchimame). Drying is said to concentrate the vegetable's flavor, giving each bite a deep, savory taste that builds as you chew. A finishing touch of sesame oil is said to add fragrance.
How it's made
The dried greens are brought to a boil in plenty of water, then left off the heat to rehydrate overnight, it's said. Once softened, they're cut into roughly 3cm lengths and stir-simmered with chopped fried tofu and konnyaku. A drizzle of sesame oil at the end is said to round out the aroma, and adding uchimame lets the soybeans' savoriness seep into the dish for extra depth.
Why it took this shape
Kukitachi keeps sending out side shoots even after its main stem is picked, allowing repeated harvests, and drying it in the sun is said to have turned it into a way of stocking up for winter when leafy greens grow scarce. The need to keep vegetable-based nourishment on the table through snowbound months is thought to be what shaped this dish of simmered dried greens.
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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
Related lineage
- Udo to Shimidaikon no DonkoroniDaikon boiled, frozen on the snow, and dried under the eaves through the coldest weeks becomes shimidaikon, simmered here with spring udo and dried herring — a dish of the Mogami region. Udo's cut cross-section is said to resemble a log, donkoro, which gives the dish its name.
- Hyoboshi no NimonoPurslane, called hyo, is picked in summer, boiled, and sun-dried into a keeping food, then rehydrated and simmered with shirataki, carrot, and fried tofu for New Year. The name is said to be played on for luck — a wish that something good might happen, hyotto, this year.
Also from Yamagata
- Akayu Karamiso RamenMiso ramen with a knob of chili miso in the center, dissolved gradually to shift the flavor.
- Akebi no Miso ZumeyakiThe bittersweet rind of the akebia fruit is stuffed with minced meat and maitake mushroom simmered in miso and sugar, tied with kitchen string, and grilled. Elsewhere in Japan the white pulp is what gets eaten, but Yamagata is said to hold onto the unusual custom of eating the rind instead.
- DongarajiruWinter cod caught in the coldest weeks goes into a miso soup head to tail, innards included — said to trace back to fishermen's cooking on the Shonai coast. The liver's richness carries the flavor, and the traditional way adds only a scrap of rock nori, no scallion.
- Hatahata no YuageHatahata, scaleless sailfin sandfish that crowd the Shonai coast to spawn, are boiled whole and eaten with nothing more than grated daikon and soy sauce — a simple winter fish dish. With no scales to remove, it is said to have become a fixture of Shonai's autumn and winter table.
- ImoniTaro, beef, konnyaku, and scallion simmer together in a soy-based autumn hot pot said to trace to boatmen on the Mogami River, who cooked taro and dried cod on the riverbank while waiting out the delays of cargo transport. On the Shonai coast the same dish turns to pork and miso.