For Sonoko Sakai, working with your hands affects more than just the food you make via nparts
Our cookbook of the week is Japanese Home Cooking by teacher, noodle maker and grain activist Sonoko Sakai. To try a recipe from the book, check out: Chilled soba noodles with walnut dipping sauce, okonomiyaki pancakes with bonito flakes, and Japanese chicken curry with relish of the seven lucky gods.
For the California-based cooking teacher and author, an appreciation of the downshift inherent in working with dough came a decade ago, when she started making noodles from scratch. A pursuit that began as a means of satisfying “a persistent, chronic kind of hunger” for the kind of noodles she couldn’t find in the U.S. became a desire to educate others about the value of heritage grains.
Prior to devoting herself to grain activism and teaching Japanese cooking, Sakai worked in film. She explains that she has always admired people who work with their hands. But it was while producing a movie in a small village in Nagano, Japan that her respect for artisans took on new meaning, and ultimately propelled her career in a different direction.
“She even caught the koi in the pond to make the fish dish. The pickles were also made with the vegetables that she grew. It was all within her means and sustainable, and the idea that in contrast, my life was about bringing snow equipment from Canada and getting all these exotic birds from different zoos in Japan,” Sakai recalls, laughing. “When I was watching her do this I thought, we all have to go back to being a little bit closer to nature.
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