Sushi is the quintessential Japanese food. Right? Nowadays, yes. But not always….
Let’s travel back a long time. It’s hard to know exactly what people were doing with their fish and when they were doing it. But sometime in these centuries, the Chinese, and possibly Koreans and other Southeast Asians (not the Japanese!), were fermenting fish using salt and rice. Fermenting is a way of preserving food so it doesn’t spoil. How do we know they were doing this? An ancient Chinese dictionary from the 4th century mentions it!
This fermented fish was sushi in its earliest form (even though no one knew what it would ultimately become!). Called nare-sushi, the fish fermenting process could take up to a year. When people ate the fish, they threw away the rice, using only the preserved fish. And that fish was probably quite pungent (that is, smelly). Pretty different from the sushi we know today!
Fast forward hundreds of years to the 8th or 9th century… Again, we can’t know precisely when it happened, because ship inventory lists haven’t survived, but around this time, sushi was brought to Japan, probably by immigrants or travelers. Nothing really exciting happened, though, as the Japanese continued using the rice to preserve and enhance the flavor of the fish. They would then throw out the rice before eating the fish.
Sushi undergoes a transformation finally! During Japan’s Muromachi period (1336−1573), vinegar became very popular in the country (though it had been there for probably close to a thousand years or more). During this time, people started mixing vinegar with the rice they were using to preserve their fish, which shortened the fermentation time. They also stopped tossing out their fish-preserving rice and ate it with their fish. The Japanese give this dish a new name: haya-zushi.
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