Hot pot & soups
Sake no Kasuni
Sake no kasuni — salted salmon simmered in sake lees
Salted salmon simmers slowly in sake lees until the broth turns rich and thick — a New Year's Eve dish of eastern Nagano and Kamiina, where salmon is the customary year-end fish in the east while yellowtail takes that role in the west, made in a big pot on New Year's Eve to eat through the holiday.
- Origin: Nagano
- About 160 km northwest of Tokyo
What it's made of
Salted salmon is simmered slow and rich in sake lees until the broth turns silky, a dish said to be the fare of New Year's Eve. The richness and faint sweetness of the lees soak into the salmon, giving a deep, warming flavor said to reach down to the bone. Nagano is said to divide roughly east and west -- salmon as the New Year's fish in the east, yellowtail in the west -- and in the Toshin and Kami-Ina regions, this salmon dish is said to be what welcomes the new year.
How it's made
Salted salmon is cut into chunks and simmered slowly in a broth of dissolved sake lees. Some households keep it simple with just salmon and lees; others add vegetables for a heartier dish, it's said. A big pot is made on New Year's Eve, and whatever's left over is said to sometimes go into New Year's Day zoni with the addition of mochi.
Why it took this shape
A custom is said to survive of preparing an auspicious fish as a feast on New Year's Eve, in preparation for welcoming the year's deity. In the eastern regions, including Hokushin where salmon was caught locally, salmon is said to have become the fish of choice for that feast. In a mountain region far from the sea, a fish treated as a once-a-year treat seems to have been turned, through slow simmering in rich lees, into a dish worth carrying forward each New Year.
Before you go
- Foods to look for in winterA guide to foods often seen in Japan around winter — nabe hot pot, fugu, oysters, crab, year-end soba, and osechi — with rough pointers for finding them.
- At yakiniku, shabu-shabu, and hot potGrilling your own meat at yakiniku, swishing thin slices at shabu-shabu, and sharing from the pot — the customs behind each.
Dishes in the same style
- Aichi Miso OdenA pot of sweet red miso sits in the center of the simmering pot, and daikon, tofu, and other ingredients simmered in dashi are dipped into it before eating. While soy-based Kanto-style oden spread in Edo, Aichi is said to have settled on dipping in soybean miso instead.
- Aichi ZoniSquare mochi and mochina, a traditional Owari green, are served in a plain clear broth for New Year — a notably simple zoni. It's speculated that using miso so often in daily cooking is exactly why a clear broth is chosen for this festive occasion, deliberately leaving miso out.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Also from Nagano
- Anyoji RamenSaku's miso ramen built around Anyoji miso, held to be the root of Shinshu miso.
- Gudakusan Miso ShiruRoot vegetables like daikon, carrot, and burdock go generously into this everyday miso soup of Nagano. Packing it with vegetables is said to allow less miso overall, and wheat dumplings are sometimes dropped in to make it a meal in itself.
- HangoroshiSticky rice, pounded only halfway to a texture called hangoroshi, is coated in sweet bean paste or roasted soybean flour — eastern Nagano's version of botamochi and ohagi, called one name in spring and the other in autumn, a festive sweet that busy farm households could put together quickly.
- Hitashi MameGreen soybeans are boiled until still faintly crisp, then steeped in a lightly seasoned dashi — a dish of northern and eastern Nagano also made with the saddle-marked kurakake bean, sometimes paired with herring roe as part of New Year's osechi.
- Hoshikabocha no EgomaaeKabocha squash, sliced into strips and sun-dried until brittle, is rehydrated and tossed in ground perilla seed — a preserved dish of the Kinasa area born from the need to keep squash, which spoils easily over winter, also used simmered or as filling for oyaki.
- Hoba MakiRice-flour dough kneaded with hot water wraps sweet bean paste, then steams inside a magnolia leaf — a Kiso festival mochi. With no oak trees in the mountains, magnolia stood in, and locals say the leaf's scent settles in best the next day.