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Shizuo Tsuji was a journalist before marrying into a family that ran a cookery school in Osaka. He took it over in 1960 and built it into Japan's largest and most influential culinary school, with thousands of students each year.
The curious thing is that he was also a Francophile. Tsuji trained in France, was a close friend of Paul Bocuse and the Troisgros brothers and did more than anyone else to bring French cooking to Japan. The man who explained Japanese cooking to the West was therefore the same man who explained French cooking to Japan.
The book does not begin with recipes. It begins with ingredients, equipment and technique, and the section on knives and cutting techniques is still the best thing written on the subject in English. Dashi is treated as the foundation on which everything else rests, with pages devoted to kombu and katsuobushi before a single dish is presented.
The foreword to the original edition was written by M.F.K. Fisher.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 508
Language: English
First published: 1980
The Kitchen Lab Selection
Forty-five years without a successor is quite a legacy. The book explains Japanese cooking from the ground up, and so far no one has seen a reason to do the work again. There are countless books about Japan, and this is the one we put in the hands of someone who is only going to own one. Not because it is the most beautiful, because it isn't, but because it teaches a cuisine rather than merely displaying it. Once you have read Tsuji, you can use the others. Start at the other end and you get recipes you can follow, but nothing you can build on. This is still the book to start with, and one of the few you rarely outgrow.
