It’s that time of year – oshogatsu (New Year’s) – for Japanese-Americans, a much bigger deal than Christmas. My grandmother hosted the New Year’s open house on Pine Street before the war, and every year after it until my mother took over the tradition and it moved to the Richmond District. Through the years, traditional Japanese New Year’s food (o-sechi) morphed into something a bit more eclectic: along with sushi, roast turkey; Chinese chicken salad; tabouli; lemon meringue pie; and whatever else people felt like bringing and sharing.

For many years, I helped my mother make many of the dishes, and eventually took over my favorites, including inarizushi (or “brown bags” as my sisters and I sometimes called them). I made them from scratch just as my mother did, and as her mother did. I would cut the aburage, or fried tofu (the brown bags) in half, slit open each half, pour boiling water over them to get rid of some of the oil, and cook them in a mixture of soy sauce and mirin for quite a while. During this cooking down of the sauce, the recipe, typewritten on onionskin paper, instructed us to “otoshibuta” (and in my deficient but imaginative Japanese-language translation, I thought this meant to “drop the pig”). Every year, I speculated for a few minutes what it meant to drop the pig. (A couple of years ago it occurred to me that I could google the term; and I found out that it means to cover everything with a wooden lid that floats on the surface of the broth. Since I never did this, you can probably make inarizushi without “otoshibuta”ing – but it might taste better with it!

Then I would cook the rice and flavor it with rice vinegar, sugar, and salt and let it cool. There’s an art to making the perfect inarizushi. Unfortunately, I never discovered it. My sister Joan would sometimes help stuff the bags – but Joan’s inarizushi were the size of bloated whales. Eat one of Joan’s monstrous inarizushi, and you would have room for nothing else. I, on the other hand, was always worried that the bag would be dry and tasteless, so I would not squeeze it out enough before filling it with rice, and when you bit into one of mine, juice would drip down your chin. Over the years, new technology became available (pre-seasoned tofu pouches sold in cans or plastic packets) but I scoffed and maintained the old ways. My inarizushi would be authentic!

The turning point came when I found out that the Nisei ladies at Pine Methodist church, who made sushi each year to sell at the annual chicken teriyaki bazaar, used pre-seasoned tofu pouches! If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for me! (and it tasted a lot better…).

In my childhood, we referred to inarizushi as “kon-kon sushi,” and I did so until I was laughed at by authentic Japanese people (my ESL students) when I was in my 20s. I wondered if “kon-kon sushi” was family terminology, since no one else seemed to know what it meant. I just recently discovered that Inari is the Shinto god of rice, and his messenger is the fox. “Kon-kon” is supposed to be the onomatopoeia for the sound a fox makes in Japanese. Vindication!

So, I use these (purchased from Yaoya-san, a Japanese market near my house). They come 12/packet and include (the ultimate decadence) sushi-rice-flavoring packets. All you have to do is cook the rice.

Since my grandmother was from Wakayama, I always made Kansai-style inarizushi, using sushi rice that is mixed with many different ingredients such as slivers of flavored carrot, bits of kamaboko, etc. When I lived in Japan as an adult, I discovered that Kanto (Tokyo)-style inarizushi is very different. It usually uses plain sushi rice, perhaps sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds. I started making it that way. (I really did prefer it – it’s not that it was so much easier and I am the laziest cook in the world…)

Then, a couple of years ago, I hit on the idea of mixing hijiki into the rice. I love hijiki. It’s seaweed mixed with carrot bits and little strips of age, cooked in dashi, soy sauce, mirin, etc.).

I get the hijiki at Yaoya-san also (although it is possible to make it from scratch – I have no idea how. My sister Susan would probably know. My dad used to urge my Jewish friend Scarlet to try it (and other seaweed products) by saying, “It’ll turn your hair black.” 

Scarlet brought her family to a Sasaki New Year’s in the early 1990s. For some reason, kids always go straight for the inarizushi, (maybe because the bags resemble Santa’s sack) and her young daughter Hannah was no exception. Hannah carefully opened the “bag,” ate the rice, and left the skin folded neatly on her plate. So cute!

Here’s the recipe.

To make 24 inarizushis, buy two packs of pre-seasoned aburage. Buy a little tray of hijiki. Then go home and cook 1.5 cups of Japanese rice (about 1.5 cups of water, maybe a bit more – I like my rice on the firm, dry side). (The instructions on the packet say – I believe, since they’re written in Japanese) to make 3 cups, so I made 2, but I had a lot of rice left over. I wonder if Joan wrote that recipe?). As you take the cooked rice from the pot, mix in the sushi-rice flavoring from the packet and mix (with a shamoji, using a cutting motion so as not to smash the rice). Let it cool. When cool, mix in the hijiki.

Then stuff (firmly enough so that the rice doesn’t fall out, but not so firmly that you mash the rice. Do not overstuff! Leave enough overlap so that you can fold the edges over to close the bag).

And eat.

Images © R. A. Sasaki