The scene
It doesn't take long until we see just how big of a part food and eating has in Our Little Sister, as already the second scene involves food.
Yoshino has spent the night at her boyfriend's place and returns home early in the morning. Her younger sister Chika, still in the process of getting up, gently reminds Yoshino to let them know if she doesn't come home, while the stern big sister Sachi, not having slept a second all night, reprimands her for always being late for important matters.
Yoshino has spent the night at her boyfriend's place and returns home early in the morning. Her younger sister Chika, still in the process of getting up, gently reminds Yoshino to let them know if she doesn't come home, while the stern big sister Sachi, not having slept a second all night, reprimands her for always being late for important matters.
We then join the trio gathered around the table in the tatami room, having breakfast and going through the day's business together.
Breakfast in the tatami room.
From left to right: Chika, Sachi, Yoshino.
They have received word that their estranged father has passed away and someone has to attend the funeral held a considerable distance away. The now adult sisters live in their grandparents' old house in Kamakura (a seaside town south of Tokyo, also where most of the film was actually filmed) while their father lived with his third wife in the northern prefecture Yamagata, several hours away by train. Sachi tells her sisters that she has learned their father had a fourth daughter with his second wife - a younger sister they have never met. Sachi has a night shift and has to skip the funeral but she suggests Yoshino and Chika go instead.
The food
We can see that the table is full of various plates and bowls of food. Now, unfortunately most of the dishes on the table aren't shown in detail, so I might not have been able to catch or identify everything. However, here's what I believe is on offer, based on what I could make out and also what typical breakfast foods are in Japan mentioned in various resources (for example, the article How to Prepare a Traditional Japanese Breakfast by Setsuko Yoshizuka): rice (white bowls), miso soup (wooden bowls), natto (in the white bowl held by Yoshino and in her rice bowl), pickled vegetables (on the black plate in the middle of the table), a vegetable side dish (on the white plate in the middle of the table) and, of course, tea. There's another plate next to Yoshino's rice bowl with something I have no idea about.
So - no cornflakes, toast, yoghurt or even a single croissant in sight, but a whole variety of dishes you'd never find in a Western breakfast table. But as far as I know, it's quite a traditional Japanese breakfast. Perhaps you could say it's more on the savoury side, with flavours you'd expect with your lunch or dinner. But I'd say breakfast foods around the world are generally things that are quick and easy to make and also readily available at any moment, and that's exactly we have here as well. Let's go through it all.
Steamed rice
If you know only one thing about Japanese cuisine, it's probably that rice is included in just about every meal. It might seem odd that you'd have plain rice for breakfast, but hey, it's easy to cook (especially with a rice cooker) and goes well with just about anything. And if you want to get fancy, you can add a bit of salt or rice toppings such as furikake (a seasoning often made with seaweed, sesame seeds and tuna flakes, but there's tons of different kinds of this) or shiso (a purplish, pleasantly sour leafy plant) to make it more flavourful. Also, if you have rice left over, you can always make onigiri and pack them for lunch or save them for later.
Miso soup
We can't really see what's in the wooden bowls Sachi has brought to the table, but they do seem to be drinking whatever is inside, so I'm willing to bet this is miso soup. And yes, in Japan it's perfectly good manners to bring your bowl of food (soup or otherwise!) up to your mouth. In fact, with chopsticks involved it's sort of the optimal way to eat as you'll have your other hand free to hold your bowl while grabbing the more solid bits with your chopsticks.
If you've been to a Japanese restaurant, including a sushi place, you've likely had miso soup as a side dish. It's an extremely common side dish to have with just about any meal, be it sushi, a rice bowl or something else. While you can pretty much throw whatever vegetables, mushrooms and meats you want to in it, the base soup is made out of miso paste (fermented soy beans and other ingredients) and dashi stock (a basic Japanese soup stock made with seaweed and/or fish). It's very easy to make, especially if you use dashi powder, and supposedly very healthy, so no wonder it too has found its way into the breakfast table. Miso soup is honestly probably my favourite part of Japanese cuisine and I actually do have it for breakfast from time to time.
Miso soup is very easy to modify to your tastes and the available ingredients, but there are probably as many miso soup recipes as there are cooks out there and as we unfortunately we can't see what the sisters' miso soup has in it, it's impossible to guess the exact ingredients they've used. I will talk about my usual recipe later.
Natto
Yoshino here seems to be a fan of natto. Natto is one of those things like, say, salmiakki in Finland or Marmite somewhere else where the locals enjoy it while most foreigners will probably think it's incredibly gross. I'm sure wherever you're from also has such a dish that you love but others would find nasty. Natto is basically soy beans fermented with a specific kind of healthy bacterium, and it's supposed to be very good for your health and especially stomach.
The thing is, however, it's definitely at the very least quite weird, especially if you don't know what you're in for. I've personally had natto only once, just before my first trip to Japan. My brother very considerately wanted me to try some of the weirder stuff before I went so I'd know what was waiting for me and got me a box of natto, amongst other things. Now, some people find the smell and taste gross, but I didn't mind them. It actually tasted a bit like coffee, of all things (also - I'm not a coffee drinker, so take that how you will), but if there was something potentially offensive about it, it was the texture. Natto is incredibly, astoundingly slimy, seriously, unlike just about anything else you've ever had. When you grab a bit of natto with your chopsticks and lift it, strands of slime will stretch as high as your hands go. It's a weird experience and not something I've yearned to repeat... But for the purposes of this project, I will. Oh no!
Pickled vegetables (tsukemono)
At first I thought that the white and orange morsels Sachi grabs from this plate might've been some kind of meat or fish, but if you pay attention to the sounds, there's a nice crunch when Sachi bites into one. Pickled vegetables are mentioned in the article linked above and even mentioned later in the movie, so I figured it'd have to be that. Based on the colors I'd say we're probably looking at carrots, cucumber as well as daikon radish or lotus root.
Pickled vegetables are a common, easy side dish for any Japanese meal, and also likely something you'll have in your fridge, so this one's also a no-brainer for the breakfast table. You might think that pickles for breakfast sounds perhaps a bit too savoury or salty, but in my experience Japanese pickles aren't quite as salty or vinegary as at least the pickled cucumbers I've had in Finland and elsewhere in Europe. I'm sure there are tons of recipes for pickled veggies and we can't exactly say how the sisters have done theirs, unfortunately, but I used a very simple method which I'll talk about later.
Vegetable side dish (kobachi)
Now, this one's perhaps the most difficult one, because on this plate there's something green but it's impossible to tell what it is and none of the women touch it in this short scene. Based on the article linked above, it's probably some kind of vegetable side dish, also known as kobachi. The recipe the article points to is for a kind of kale salad, but I would say the sisters' bowl of greens looks more like peas or beans.
Tea
I mean, that's just tea, right? Probably green tea but could be black too, either hot or cold. In my experience the Japanese like their drinks hot in the winter and cold in the summer. Mindblowing, I know.
Recreating the food
So! Here's my recreation of the sisters' breakfast. In the spirit of keeping preparing breakfast as easy and quick as possible, I've opted to use a couple of shortcuts.
The rice I've steamed using my rice cooker. It's simply plain short grain white rice, nothing fancy. Just remember to wash your rice before steaming it or there'll be foam and the consistency won't be ideal. I also decided to do the simplest vegetable side dish possible and steamed some peas I had lying around using the steamer tray in my rice cooker. I only added a bit of salt to them. On the topic of rice cookers - if you eat a lot of rice, absolutely, definitely get one if you haven't already! It's astoundingly simple and makes cooking rice a breeze or perhaps even a delight. You never have to keep watch on it or do anything apart from putting the right amount of rice and water in the pot. Also, it keeps the rice warm for hours if you need it to and it'll even steam vegetables for you while cooking the rice. If you don't eat a lot of rice, well, there's no reason to bother with one.
While I suppose you probably could, I'm not going to start making natto myself so I just grabbed these single servings of it (lower left-hand corner) at Tokyokan, the Japanese store in Helsinki. It comes with soy sauce and mustard you mix into the beans.
For the tsukemono I could've used one of the several recipes found in the Finnish-language Japanese homecooking book recently released by Suomalais-Japanilainen Yhdistys ry (Finnish Japanese Society), but some time back I noticed something at Tokyokan I wanted to try:
It's pickling powder! Really simple, you take 100-150 grams of whatever vegetables you fancy, cut 'em into chopstick-friendly pieces, put them in a bag with the powder, rub and shake it around for two mins and stick it in the fridge. In 30 minutes you have nice pickles. I was suprised to see it required no liquid of any kind, but it turned out the powder draws out the liquid in the vegetables. The end result is very nice and gets even better if you wait longer than 30 minutes. I put my pickles in the fridge the previous night. Also, please note my flower-shaped carrots and decoratively peeled cucumber slices. Yeah, I'm badass like that.
I'm lazy so I use dashi powder for my miso soup instead of making dashi from scratch. My normal miso soup includes light miso and at the very least wakame seaweed and spring onion and hopefully also tofu, if I've got some. Hey - eating lots of tofu gets expensive! Also, in my opinion you can't just use any tofu. It needs to be the firm silken kind, the stuff that's silky smooth but doesn't immediately break apart when you so much as breathe in its general direction.
Here's my basic recipe for enough miso soup to fill two of the small bowls in the photo above:
- 0.5 l water
- 1 tsp. dashi powder (a bit more if using kombu dashi)
- 1 Tbsp. miso paste (I prefer light miso paste for miso soup but you can use whichever you like)
- 1 Tbsp. dried wakame seaweed
- a third of a block of silken firm tofu
- some spring onion
Put the water and dashi powder in a pot, stir, add wakame, tofu and spring onion, and slowly bring to a boil. Turn off the heat, take a cup of the stock and mix the miso paste into it, then add back into the pot. It's important to add the miso paste last and only after you've turned off the heat, because the healthy bacteria in miso paste die when cooked. Serve hot.
An even faster way is to use an electric kettle to boil the water and then add everything in, but letting the vegetables simmer for a bit gets more flavour out of them.
And then there's tea. I went with black tea. Deal with it.
Trying it out
Even though there are several dishes, it didn't take long at all to put it all together. You wash the rice and put it in the cooker, and while that's doing its thing, you prepare everything else. Easy! It'd be even easier if you had two people helping you. I guess the problem with using so many bowls and plates is that you'll have to do a lot of dishes later (luckily I have a dishwasher).
I really liked the pickles eaten together with rice like Sachi does, and sipping on miso soup just fills my soul with warmth every time. This was my first time making Japanese pickles but I'll definitely be doing more of it in the future. The steamed peas weren't particularly exciting, but that's on me and my laziness. Now, as for the natto - well, I don't think this second time trying it has made me a natto guy yet. The taste is something I could see you could get used to, but the texture is just too weird to get over. You're supposed to eat it with rice, and while it does helps a bit, the slimy and sticky texture still cuts through. I don't love the feeling of a mucus-like substance coating my mouth and teeth, as healthy as natto is supposed to be. Anyone in Helsinki want two boxes of natto?
Anyway, this was a fine breakfast. I don't actually eat breakfast regularly, but could see myself doing a simpler version of this (rice, miso soup, tsukemono, maybe fish) from time to time. And, as mentioned, I already have miso soup for breakfast occasionally.
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