Home-style ── Yoshoku (Japanese Western-style dishes)
Guratan
Gratin — macaroni or meat in white sauce, baked with cheese
Macaroni 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.
- Other styles
Lineage
What it's made of
In a heatproof dish, macaroni, chicken, or mushrooms sit wrapped in white sauce, the surface baked with cheese until it browns. Dig a spoon in and the browned cheese cracks with a snap, sauce spilling molten from beneath, it's said. Its flexibility with whatever filling is on hand is also said to be part of the appeal, and it's long been a winter table favorite.
How it's made
The usual method is to mix boiled macaroni or sauteed ingredients into a white sauce made from milk, butter, and flour, put it in a heatproof dish, top it with cheese, and bake it until browned. Only the surface is baked to a fragrant finish while the inside is kept smooth and saucy, and many kitchens take care in how the filling is prepped beforehand.
Why it took this shape
One account holds that after French gratin was introduced to Japan as Western cooking, it's said to have spread as a home-style version built around ingredients easy to find — macaroni, chicken, corn — for a table more used to rice and noodles than bread. It's said to have branched off from doria, which uses the same white sauce, mainly by what filling replaces the rice, and it later found its way onto school lunch menus too.
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
- Omu SobaSauce yakisoba wrapped in a thin sheet of egg, a local specialty from Osaka. Said to apply omurice's trick of wrapping rice in egg to yakisoba instead.
- Biifu ShichuuBeef and root vegetables simmered in a demi-glace-style sauce. Introduced as a high-end dish at Tokyo yoshoku restaurants in the Meiji era, it's said to have settled onto home tables as packaged roux spread.