TriumphAnt

Almost from the first line of her first pre-arrival e-mailed messages to us (“Dear my host family…”), Hikana had said she hoped we would allow her to prepare one of her cooking specialties in our kitchen.

Despite its name – nikujaga – and the fact that Hikana had already alerted us that this was a standard meal in Japanese homes, the ingredients were also pretty standard North American fare: very thinly sliced beef, potatoes, carrots, onions, and just two mysteries: what was the “seasoning” she mentioned in her recipe (more about that below), and what on earth was something she wrote for us on her brief list of ingredients: “konjak”?

When I pointed out the word, she said it aloud and what she said was “cognac”. So now I’m thinking, better and better. A traditional Japanese recipe probably refined by her Cordon Bleu-trained father to appeal to an even wider palate – people who like strong drink. She drew a square and, pointing to it, she said, “Not this konjak.” (Aha! I concluded. That lets out the hallmark square bottle of Cointreau. No problem.)

Then, when I asked her about the “seasoning”, she scooted back to her room and emerged with a small bottle of dark brown fluid. When I smelled it, I realized she had come all the way from Japan with her own bottle of soy sauce. But as it turned out, once we tasted the finished product, we realized that this was a uniquely sweetened soy that imparted a fabulous flavour to the broth base that shouted to the world that, though soy sauce it may well have been born, it has matured into soy sauce – plus. (I don’t doubt that by adding a touch of demerara sugar to any of the naturally brewed soy sauces one can buy at a major grocery store here, we can manage an approximate facsimile. But it has a unique sweetness that I doubt we could ever precisely duplicate. I’m hoping one of Ottawa’s Asian food specialty shops sells the real thing.)

On the recipe she had painstakingly worked out for us, Hikana had put “konjak” in brackets and, with a little work on the translator, we discovered that she meant it was “optional”. (Her recipe is a memento all in itself. It is festooned with little drawings that show, for example, the carrot chopped into little pieces of carrot. Even the drawn pile of little pieces she showed in the pot grows larger in each successive drawing as new bunches of chopped vegetables are added.)

We didn’t actually have cognac in the house, but we did want this recipe to be perfect so I was prepared to head out and buy a bottle if she said cognac or nothing. But first, I pulled a small bottle of Southern Comfort – a US “fifth”; a Canadian “mickey” – out of our cupboard and asked her to take a whiff, in order to determine whether any fortified liquor would suffice.

She looked at the bottle in great confusion, so I tapped it and said “cognac… similar”. Then I opened it and let her smell the stuff that gave Janis Joplin her dulcet tones. But that only produced, if possible, an expression of even greater confusion. I returned to her drawing and tapped the square… “Not a square bottle?”

She shook the bottle as if expecting its contents to morph into something else, then looked at me and said, “Japan konjak is… food, not drink.” She set the recipe down and mimed an action that looked like taffy pulling. The confused look was still there, but now it was on my face. Back to the translator. She entered a few keystrokes and tried out her English reading of what appeared on its screen. “S… Sreds?” Then she handed it to me, and I read the word, “threads”.

Threads of cognac?

Alright, to heck with the translator; it was time to unlimber the heavy artillery – Google.

So I said, “two minutes”, and off I went to my own computer.

At being asked to search “konjak”, Google was marvelous. The very first hit yielded a drawing-rich explanation that told me that konjak, in fact, begins life as a flour made by drying and grinding a plant called “devil’s tongue” – which one site rather unhelpfully called a “noxious invasive weed” and which another site called “foul-smelling”. The flour is then mixed with a little water and the resulting “konjak” paste can be purchased in two forms – either as a block (the square that Hikana had drawn) or as… yep, strings… Threads!

So off I went to do some shopping. Ottawa has a reasonably large Asian community, nowhere close in size to Toronto or Vancouver. Ours is a real polyglot that began as largely Chinese, but which was vastly augmented by surges of post-Vietnam War boat people. So almost every store in our “Chinatown” advertises not one unique nationality, but often countless variations like, “Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and Asian Grocery”. There are some places that are not much bigger than a Canadian home’s vestibule, but which have a seemingly endless scope of product: “Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Asian and Canadian market”. In fact, it often seems that the smaller the store, the larger its diversity.

I waded into the first one I saw whose advertised Asian service repertoire included “Japanese”. To my utter amazement, immediately inside the door on the floor by the cash register was a large cardboard box with a hand-lettered sign, “konyakku”. The box was chock-a-block with plastic-sealed packets of white… threads!... swimming in a clear liquid I assumed to be water. On closer examination, I realized, good heavens, “konjak” is a fine white – an almost translucent white – noodle!

I bought six bags. (Hikana had not indicated how much she wanted, and I wanted to cover off every possible option from a small side dish to a platter full of the stuff onto which she might be planning to ladle the nikujaga.)

Just to make sure, on my way back to the car, I stopped in at a store in a different part of town that I already knew sold exclusively Japanese products. It’s a little more upscale and a lot more sedate than the market bustle of our Chinatown’s stores. It caters not so much to the Japanese members of our Asian community, but to round-eyes like me who are looking for the precise ingredients to fill out a Japanese recipe, or the utensils / accessories with which to prepare and serve it.

The helpful staff was able to confirm for me that konjak is, indeed, nothing more than either a small brick (ita-konjak) or a fine noodle (ito-konjak). And they had both. Hoo hah, I was already ahead of the game in knowing that I wanted the noodle version. But… oh no! They had it in two colours! One was the same white I had already purchased, but the other was a sort of dark olive / seaweed green. And Hikana had not specified a colour. So I asked what the difference was. And in one of those wonderful Kodak moments that I am sure marks successful diplomatic relations throughout history, they both looked at me, then at the bags on their shelves, then back at me as though waiting for some further elaboration on what was obviously a trick question, before the older of the two finally looked me square in the eye and answered, “the colour”.

(Thanks again to Google, I have since discovered that the darker state is its natural colour and the white product has simply undergone an extra refining process to produce the more visually pleasing pristine white. So in other words, “colour” just about says it all as a description of the difference.)

Hikana, as it happened, was delighted by the white konjak I brought home.

To make a long story short, nikujaga is a one-pot stew, but it sits in a deliciously light broth, rather than the gravy we are accustomed to think of when we think of “stew”.

Its beef should be sliced to a thinness the deli-counter calls “shaved beef”. The presence of a generous amount of potato in the recipe means it needs no side dish like rice or pasta. We followed it with instant miso soup, something else Hikana had brought with her from Japan. In fact, the sheer variety of native foodstuffs she has produced since her arrival leads me to believe that the student travelers must have managed to avoid airport drug sniffing dogs because the wall of aromas wafting from her luggage would likely have caused a coronary in an unsuspecting passing German Shepherd.

There’s nothing more than that magnificent sweetened soy as a seasoning, and the konjak did add a very subtle tang in counterpoint to the broth’s sweetness. The simplicity of these seasonings also serves to enhance the subtle differences in the other ingredients, turning the lowly potato, carrot and onion into gourmet foods.

I’m not sure how many helpings I had – several, certainly. Hikana was tempering her delight at seeing how much we enjoyed her cooking with what seemed to be some quiet alarm. After supper, she confessed that she had promised her English teachers a sample the next day, something she was far too polite to have accommodated by reserving a serving before presenting her dish to us. But even without knowing that, we did leave more than enough to enable her to take a very large serving into class the following morning.

All’s well that… etc.

So, does anyone have any ideas on what to do with five leftover bags of “foul-smelling” “noxious weed”? Going once… going twice…