Home-style ── Yoshoku (Japanese Western-style dishes)
Doria
Doria — butter rice and creamed shrimp baked under white sauce and cheese
Butter rice topped with shrimp in cream, covered in white sauce and cheese and baked. Said to have been improvised at a Yokohama hotel for a guest who wasn't feeling well.
- Origin: Kanagawa Yokohama
- Rice dishes
Lineage
What it's made of
In a gratin dish, butter rice and shrimp simmered in cream sit hidden beneath white sauce. The surface is baked with cheese until it browns, and a spoon pulls up cheese strings along with a rise of steam. It's said to have been meant as something easy to swallow, gentle enough on the stomach, and some shops use chicken or mushroom in place of shrimp.
How it's made
The usual method is to spread butter rice in a dish, top it with shrimp simmered in cream, cover it with a gratin-style white sauce, and bake it with cheese until browned. The sauce is kept thick enough to coat the ingredients, and the surface alone is baked to a char so the inside stays soft and the rice underneath keeps its shape.
Why it took this shape
One account traces it to the hotel's opening in 1927, when a guest staying there who wasn't feeling well asked for 'something easy to get down.' The head chef is said to have improvised on the spot, laying shrimp simmered in cream over butter rice, covering it in gratin sauce and cheese, and baking it. It reportedly proved popular enough to become a regular menu item, and is still served today as shrimp doria.
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
- Chikin RaisuRice fried with chicken, onion, and ketchup. Said to have started as omurice's filling before being served on its own, without the egg wrapper.
- Hayashi RaisuSliced beef and onion simmered in a demi-glace-style sauce, ladled over rice. Said to trace back to a dish Maruzen's founder Hayashi Yuteki served to visiting friends, though the naming itself has more than one story.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Related lineage
- Supagetti NaporitanAfter Japan's surrender, Hotel New Grand in Yokohama was requisitioned by GHQ, and the occupying troops there ate boiled spaghetti simply tossed with ketchup. After the requisition ended, Irie Shigetada, who became the hotel's second head chef, built a proper sauce around caramelized onion and garlic and fresh and canned tomato, turning the soldiers' snack into a hotel dish.
- GuratanMacaroni or chicken mixed with white sauce, topped with cheese and baked. Said to have spread as a home-style version built around easy-to-find fillings, branching off from doria mainly by what replaces the rice.
Also from Kanagawa
- Ebi MayoBattered, fried shrimp are tossed in a sweet mayonnaise-based sauce — said to have begun when a Cantonese chef, unsatisfied with a mayonnaise-dressed shrimp dish he'd eaten in the United States, remade it his own way.
- Gyu NabeA Yokohama-born hot pot of beef, tofu and chrysanthemum greens simmered from the start in a soy or miso-based sauce. Born of the port city's encounter with Western meat-eating culture, it is said to trace to a tavern owner who opened one of the first beef-pot restaurants.
- Harihari-zukeDaikon cut thicker than ordinary kiriboshi strips, dried, then pickled in a soy-based sauce — a Miura Peninsula specialty. Its name is said to echo the crisp "hari-hari" bite, developed in Miura, a daikon-growing region since the Edo period.
- Herahera DangoA confection from Sajima in Yokosuka City, flattened dumplings of wheat or glutinous rice flour coated in sweet bean paste. Offered at the shrine during a summer boat festival to pray for a good catch and good health, it is still shared among family.
- Hiratsuka-kei TanmenA clear, salt-based broth carries a faint edge of acidity, topped with wakame seaweed and chopped onion — a thinner, less thickened bowl than the typical Kanagawa tanmen, said to have taken root among Chinese-style diners in Hiratsuka.
- Iekei RamenPork bone and chicken carcass simmered long and finished with a dark soy tare and chicken fat, paired with thick, short noodles, spinach, and nori — traced to a shop that opened in 1974 in Yokohama's Shinsugita district and is said to have spread among workers in the surrounding industrial zone.