Japanese confections

I have decided to transform myself into an expert on Japanese sweets. Yesterday I ate this:

This is called a Kuri Manju, which is a baked or steamed cake filled with sweet white bean paste and chopped chestnuts. Then, today, I ate a variation on this confectionary theme:

This is called a Yokan, a thick jellied item made of agar agar, bean paste, sugar, and, in certain cases, additional ingredients like fruit paste, figs, or sweet potato. The one I had today was light green and shaped like a flower.

I find these confectionary traditions WILDLY FASCINATING.




Apparently these items are traditional sweets that emerged out of ancient Japan called Wagashi, and are often served with tea. They typically involve bean paste, fruits, and other plant-based items. They typically don't involve milk, cream, or extreme amounts of eggs -- hallmark ingredients of Western desserts. According to Wikipedia, way back in 1349, Zen priest Rin Join pioneered steamed dumplings filled with honeysuckle syrup-sweetened azuki  bean paste. So, wagashi is super ancient.

I think what most interests me about these items, aside from just eating them because they are fantastic, is the fact that they significantly involve plants. The Kuri Manju I ate yesterday wasn't all about chestnuts, but it did contain chestnuts and as I tasted it I felt that the chestnuts were important -- an intrinsic aspect of the thing I was eating. I could feel the chestnut-ness in the Kuri Manju and then inside of myself. Most of these desserts rely on bean paste, which, to a Western palate, is peculiar. Obviously plenty of Western desserts I am familiar with can involve fruit or nuts, but generally, when it comes to the American desserts I grew up around (desserts were forbidden in my home because my parents were health food Nazis, but I found ways to access sweets through friends) they essentially constituted their own food group. I don't think of a brownie, or a white chocolate and marscarpone cream cake, as originating in nature. A brownie is its own entity. It belongs to itself and no other. It does not exist in the natural world. It did not originate in some other form. It is extraordinary in its extremity and power. It assaults me with pleasure. It is alien and sublime. The same goes for coconut meringue pie. And even though, say, a blackberry crumb bar with cream cheese drizzle involves blackberries, it transcends them. It doesn't belong to the fruit and has become itself -- a dessert.

In this case, a dessert wrapped in tissue and a pink bow. But even without these accouterments, it doesn't resemble anything that could grow on a tree. And, to me, that's what is so great about it. A blackberry crumb bar can transport you into a strange, imaginary sugar world of inexpressible flavor. It can come at you, to steal from Stephen King (who was describing short stories and not sweets), "full-bore, like a big hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky." A blackberry crumb bar can do that to you. The same could be said for churros with cinnamon chocolate orange sauce.

There's no way these churros aren't going to change your life, or at least knock you unconscious.

But the Japanese sweets I am discovering are something else entirely.  And frankly, Japanese confections make these more overwhelming desserts seem kind of obnoxious and heavy-handed. Like an annoying St. Bernard whose paws are wet and gross. The Kuri Manju and Yokan are more subtle, but no less imaginative, I would say. The Yokan I ate today was this oddly shaped, green jellied thing but as I ate it I tasted thick agar agar, bean paste, and light citrus and these flavors mingled together in ways that I couldn't possibly have anticipated. It wasn't especially sweet, but at the same time it was thrilling. The fact that these Japanese sweets are made from recognizable foods yet are also shaped in unusual patterns and involve surprising textures renders them both other-wordly and also rooted in nature. They make me feel heavy and light. I like the way it feels to eat them. I like the place inside myself it takes me into.

Milan Kundera has a quote about heaviness and lightness that has absolutely nothing to do with a Japanese jellied confection involving bean paste, but it actually reminds me of why it feels so good to eat one:

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? 

images:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bonobonochan/3936507537/
http://pixie-baker.blogspot.com/2010/07/blackberry-crumb-bars.html
http://2besatisfied.blogspot.com/2010/07/churros-with-cinnamon-orange-dipping.html
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://farm1.static.flickr.com/22/33614370_66a08aab8e.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.flickr.com/photos/yama/33614370