Rice, Noodle, Fish (36 page)

In total, half a dozen different expressions of Noto fermentation, a breakfast that took more than a decade of molecular breakdown to bring to the table. And all of it virtually unchanged since the days when Chikako's parents ran the inn.

The first time I eat Flatt's breakfast, I feel like I went to bed in 2014 and woke up a few centuries earlier. The flavors are timeless, the textures all-encompassing, a meal so dense with umami and history that you wonder if your taste buds will ever recover. At first it feels like an act of aggression, like floating a stick of dynamite in your coffee, but the more I eat this meal, the more I realize that my concept of breakfast will never be the same.

To Chikako, breakfast at Flatt's is more than just a collection of taste and textures; it's the legacy she inherited from her mom and dad condensed into a single spread. This—the drizzle of homemade soy, the swipe of yuzu chili paste, the hunk of hyperfermented fish—is what her parents worked so hard to create, and it's what Chikako signed on for when she moved back to Noto and
assumed the Funashita name. Ben can push the cuisine in new and interesting directions at night, so long as Chikako keeps the table filled with the fruits of fermentation in the morning.

This is no small responsibility. This isn't like inheriting your mom's cookie skills or carrying on your dad's reputation at the grill. To make Noto cuisine is an act of patience and sacrifice, one that forgoes the ease of modern conveniences like supermarkets and industrial ingredients for a deeper commitment to land and legacy. It means adapting your life to fit the fickle behavior of the seasons. It means understanding tidal rhythms and weather patterns by how they translate to the table. It means
mottainai
, “nothing goes to waste,” a philosophy that resonates through every facet of Japanese food culture. It's an ethos born not simply out of necessity or industriousness but out of the Shinto belief that objects have souls and should be honored accordingly.

To understand how seriously the people of Noto take the concept of waste, consider the fugu dilemma. Japanese blowfish, best known for its high toxicity, has been a staple of Noto cuisine for hundreds of years. During the late Meiji and early Edo periods, local cooks in Noto began to address a growing concern with fugu fabrication; namely, how to make use of the fish's deadly ovaries. Pregnant with enough poison to kill up to twenty people, the ovaries—like the toxic liver—had always been disposed of, but the cooks of Noto finally had enough of the waste and set out to crack the code of the toxic reproductive organs. Thus ensued a long, perilous period of experimentation. Locals rubbed ovaries in salt, then in
nukamiso
, a paste made from rice bran, and left them to ferment. Taste-testing the not-quite-detoxified fugu ovary was a lethal but necessary part of the process, and many years and many lives later, they arrived at a recipe that transformed the ovaries from a deadly disposable into an intensely flavored staple. Today pickled fugu ovaries remain one of Noto's most treasured delicacies.

The star of the breakfast table: a piece of mackerel fermented for four years

(Matt Goulding)

Chikako doesn't pickle fugu ovaries at Flatt's—one of the few ingredients spared fermentation at the inn—but to dedicate yourself to Noto cuisine is to see every ingredient through the same prism: how to extract every last bit of life from what nature provides.

Once you accept
mottainai
as a starting point, your life must be organized accordingly. Those persimmons don't stop ripening just because you wanted to go to Kanazawa today; that fish won't dry properly unless you gut it and salt it before the sun goes down. Chikako never stops moving, her day like a seamless sixteen-hour tutorial on how to carry the traditions of Noto forward: serve breakfast, scale some tiny fish, talk with guests, peel and juice a hundred mandarins, draw a bath, fill a bucket with plums and purple shiso leaves.

“In twenty-seven years, my parents never took a day off,” says Chikako. “My dad would say, ‘Day off? What would I do with a day off? You can't take a day off from your life.'”

More than just hard work and organization, these practices require an immense body of knowledge. Which mushrooms are safe for pickling and which will kill you? Is this type of fish best preserved in rice bran or in salt? What can I do with this tiny piece of the fruit that always ends up in the compost pile?

“The other day my mom got really upset that I was throwing away the stems on the persimmons we pick,” Chikako tells me one morning. “We pickle the peels, we dry the flesh of the fruit, but apparently the stems can be used to make tea.”

Persimmon-stem tea isn't a recipe you'll find online; it's not an idea you'd stumble onto when you buy a bag of persimmons at the store. It strikes you only after enough dirt has found its way under your fingernails.

Chikako and Ben's lives are inexorably linked to an ever-expanding list of
seasonal tasks. In summer, they work through the garden bounty, drying and pickling the fruits and vegetables at peak ripeness. Fall brings chestnuts to pick, chili paste to make, mushrooms to hunt. Come winter, Noto's seas are flush with the finest sea creatures, which means pickling fish for
hinezushi
and salting squid guts for
ishiri
. In the spring, after picking mountain vegetables and harvesting seaweed, they plant the garden and begin again the cycle that will feed them, their family, and their guests in the year ahead.

When things go well in the wild, Noto tradition has it that you should share with your neighbors. If generous rain brings you a bumper crop of mandarins, you give the families living around you a surprise taste of the season. In turn, when their cherry trees explode or their sweet potatoes sprout, they'll return the favor. It's a carryover from the barter economy that existed on this peninsula for most of its history, well into the twentieth century. In a country known best for its overwhelming urban sprawl, these flashes of rural ritual take on a very special importance.

“We might not wear kimonos every day,” says Chikako (who just so happens to be trained in the intricate art of kimono dress), “but it's amazing the traditional way still survives.”

One morning, after days of politely ignoring my request, Chikako takes me down to the
shokeba
. This is the most important room in the house, the nerve center of Noto cuisine, and I've been eager to take it all in. At first I think Chikako's hesitance is because the room might be messy, or because she fears I might try to reveal the family recipes, but the more time I spend in Noto and the more I speak with Chikako and Ben, the more I realize that to invite someone into your
shokeba
is like sitting them down with a family album—an intimate experience that requires a level of trust and familiarity.

The
shokeba
at Flatt's is housed in a basement below the kitchen. It looks
exactly like you'd imagine a pickle shed to look: dark, crowded, shelves and cement floor cluttered with plastic bottles, glass jars, large yellow buckets with contents unknown. In total Chikako and Ben have nearly two hundred different projects in the works down here, a motley collection of floating fruit, shrinking vegetables, and degrading protein. There are vinegars made from persimmon and plum, kimchi made with cabbage and daikon, liquors infused with anything that grows: yuzu, quince, grape, wild strawberry.

Like a bodega, the pickle shed is filled with living, evolving products that capture a particular moment in time: the great rains of '88, the dry spell of '91, the near-perfection of 2002. The beauty of the
shokeba
is that right now, at this very moment, it all tastes incrementally different from how it tasted yesterday and how it will taste tomorrow. Today is today, and no other day will ever be the same.

Chikako opens a few buckets to show me what she has working. In one, she grabs a fistful of tiny plums stained half purple with shiso leaves,
umeboshi
midway through its cure. Another contains soybeans well on their way to becoming miso.

The room is thick with the smell of transformation, a powerful stench that recalls a dark corner of an old library, emanating a mysterious and meaningful musk. Chikako squats down and lifts the lid on a short, wide yellow trash can, and the room explodes with another dimension of funk. “This is our
konka saba
,” she says, wiping off a muddy layer of rice husk. Below is buried a heap of mackerel rubbed in salt and chilies. “Some people bring it up after half a year, which isn't even fermented. These here have been fermenting for nearly fifteen years.” I try to do the math but can come up only with this: when the fish went into this bucket, the world was a very different place.

米 麺 魚

Wednesday is the traditional day of rest in Japan's service industry, and
Flatt's closes accordingly. But little rest ever goes down around this inn; Ben and Chikako use the time mostly to catch up on the various projects they have in the works.

One Wednesday morning, Ben wakes me up at dawn, and we head to the Suzu fish market, where the local fish auction takes place every day at 7:00 a.m. As the first rays of sun bounce off the sea and fill the market with a warm, speckled light, a mix of chefs, distributors, and fishermen survey the day's catch: buckets of tiny baitfish, giant squid oozing puddles of black ink below them, cod pregnant with the season's first roe (“Those will go for a lot today—the Japanese are willing to pay for the first taste of just about anything”). On the edge of the market, a shark, two meters long with a swollen belly streaked with blood, attracts a small group of fishermen who smoke cigarettes and ponder its demise.

Buri
, Japanese yellowtail rich with fat stored to combat the cold winter waters, have just come in, and most of the morning's energy hovers around the three hundred midsize fish lined up on the wet cement floor. The auctioneer, an old man with a walking stick he uses as a pointer, works his way quickly through the catch, balancing himself on the edges of the plastic boxes that hold the fish. He's not as animated as the tuna auctioneers of Tokyo's Tsukiji market, but he doesn't need to be; everyone here knows exactly what they want and how much they're willing to pay for it. The actual bidding comes out in thick Noto dialect, thickened further by the fact that these are fishermen—a lifetime at sea turning their tongues into mysterious instruments. Within fifteen minutes, it's over, and Ben has a bucket of sardines to add to the day's chores.

Another morning, we drive over to a grassy riverbank down the road from the inn to look for mountain vegetables, a rite of passage to the Japanese spring. “People take this shit seriously,” says Ben, explaining how different families work different tracts of land, which are closely guarded and kept within the family for generations. We return to the kitchen with three plastic bags full of long-stemmed fiddlehead ferns. Some will go in a pasta dish later tonight for dinner service but most will be preserved in
ishiri
, and served as breakfast pickles later in the year, when spring is only a distant memory.

(Matt Goulding)

To watch Ben navigate the thickets of Noto's physical and social landscape, I can think only of all the acrobatics he's performed over the years to get a foothold on this culture. Even today, two decades later, he remains a perplexing character for certain locals. “I'll be in the supermarket and people will come up to me and literally go through my basket and ask me what I'm planning to do with certain ingredients.”

It's tough for a foreigner to penetrate any area of Japanese culture, but to come to Noto, try to marry a local woman, be denied by her parents, marry her anyway, and then proceed to dedicate your life to the daily preservation of her culture—one so dense and pregnant with mystery and vagaries that it's widely unknown to the citizens of Noto themselves—to do that takes a strong mind, an iron will, and rock-hard stones in equal measure. But Ben sees it differently. “It's been incredibly humbling to learn from this family. To be in the same kitchen, to understand the mentality,” he says. “It's more than just a lifestyle; it's our life.”