Article 001: A Kabocha Remembered, and a Chrysanthemum Bowl from Arita
Summary
This essay began with a dish of simmered kabocha eaten at summer's last gasp, and the childhood memory of my mother it pulled loose.
I write about choosing a kabocha with the whole body — eyes, ears, fingertips, nose — and about the different ways my wife and I prepare the Japanese and Western varieties.
By the time I had finished writing, I realized that plating that simple dish in an Arita-ware chrysanthemum bowl had turned an ordinary meal into something closer to an occasion.
It left me thinking again about how much richness lives in the meeting of a seasonal vegetable and the right piece of tableware.
Category
Cooking, Summer
What follows is one small scene from a life lived, in part, through Japanese food.
I hope you'll read it the way you might sit by a dying fire — unhurried, and warm.
1. Thinning Out
The cicadas that had claimed the zelkova tree in my garden all summer are finally going quiet, and only now do I feel something in me start to loosen.
It's strange. Their noise had been loud enough to ache behind my eardrums, and yet now that it comes in broken fragments, what I feel isn't relief so much as a kind of loneliness.
I find this in myself and can't help laughing a little — at my own inconsistency, if nothing else.
Still, once the season settles, my appetite always rises to meet it.
And the kabocha I harvested weeks ago, the one I've kept resting in the shade ever since, has finally reached the moment it was waiting for.
2. Braided Threads
There's a particular heaviness to a kabocha in the hand, and for reasons I've never quite worked out, it's enough to call back whole afternoons from childhood.
Back then I forgot every chore, every page of homework, for the sake of staying outside a little longer.
And when I went home to visit my mother, it was the sound of her moving through the kitchen — the small clatter and hiss of cooking — and the smell of her miso soup that reopened those years wider still.
I've kept, since then, a habit of binding sound to taste to smell, tying them together until they're a single knot in memory. I haven't lost it.
This time, it isn't the miso soup but a simmered dish, just as deeply rooted, that I want to write about.
3. The Scales
When I'm choosing a kabocha at the market, I start the way anyone might — a glance at the dirt on its skin, the overall cast of its color, a rough first impression.
Then the real selection begins, and it runs through every sense I have.
With my eyes, I check the depth of the color and whether the skin holds a certain sheen.
With my ears and fingertips together, I give it a light tap and listen — and I pay attention, too, to the small resistance that travels back up through my finger.
With my nose, I lift it and smell the stem, where the truest scent of a kabocha tends to gather.
And last, I run a hand across the whole of it, asking myself, honestly, whether I still want to eat this one.
After all of that — and I say this with some embarrassment — I am wrong about as often as I am right.
4. Looking Back
When I cut one open and find the flesh dense and the smell already sweet, I resist the urge to season it. I simmer it slowly in nothing but water.
This plain method of cooking has become, oddly, a kind of correction for my senses.
I compare what I felt in my hands at the market against what the pot gives back to me, and in doing so I keep recalibrating my own instincts.
As the water-simmered kabocha nears the end of its cooking, the kitchen fills with a sweetness that isn't far from roasted chestnuts.
It's better cold, this dish — anyone who's made it knows that — and still, every single time, I can't make myself wait. I pick up my chopsticks and taste it straight from the pot, too hot, unable to help myself.
5. Layered Flavor
The "Japanese kabocha" is the one my wife and I reach for most often: its sweetness arrives slowly and stays modest, and the texture, once you've had it, is hard to describe as anything but velvet.
Its Western cousin is a different matter. You'll sometimes find it shelved under the very same name — "kabocha squash" — though the resemblance mostly ends at the label.
We slice it thin and roast it in the oven until the edges turn deep gold.
Then we pour olive oil over it, generously, without measuring.
What we get is something firmer, sweeter, closer in texture to a roasted sweet potato or a well-caramelized carrot.
And when we're making a hot pot and the kabocha has cooked down to about half its original volume, we'll sometimes tip in curry powder and a few spices, and let the whole pot turn into something else entirely.
6. Straw Hat
Tending and harvesting summer vegetables means staying half-bent for most of an afternoon, and my body feels every minute of it.
Even so, the harvest remains one of the real pleasures of my year.
On the days my wife and I are worn down from working in the heat, it's the dry-field summer vegetables — onions, cucumbers, kabocha — that save us, since none of them ask for much time at the stove, and all of them sit beautifully once they're plated.
7. The Chrysanthemum Bowl
The simmered kabocha, I always serve in a chrysanthemum-shaped medium bowl from Arita ware.
How it feels in the hand
This is the bowl I reach for almost every day at my own table.
Something about the height Fukagawa Seiji gives the foot of the bowl just suits me — held in two hands, it sits at exactly the right scale.
There's no showroom polish to it, none of that overworked smoothness you get from metal, and that absence is precisely why it feels so at home in my hands.
The width of the rim and the height of the walls are generous enough that even a heaping portion looks settled rather than precarious.
And the rim itself has enough thickness that I can stack it with other dishes at the sink without a second thought.
8. Coda
「うりとうみ ふりさけみれば とおきはは」
[Ouri to oumi, fourissaké miréba, tôki haha]
Houille Ton Ouïe, Fruit Sable Quai Myrrhe Bas, Tôt Quiétude Ah.
Un horizon d’argile, où l’azur s’abreuve.
Related Links
Arita Ware Chrysanthemum Medium Bowl
- CHINA ON THE PARK (Fukagawa Seiji Co., Ltd.)
- Link: https://www.fukagawa-seiji.co.jp/
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References
For this piece I drew on 料 01, 料 02, 料 05, 器 01, 器 02, 工 01, 暦 01.
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End of Article
What I hope to leave at your table is something small — a little discovery, and a little homesickness.