This week's installment involves Japanese food, the Oxford Companion to Food, any my desperate efforts to find bonito flakes in a Japanese supermarket. Great fun, from my perspective

What I'm Reading [About Food] this Week: The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson

The English do a great job with quirky, long gestating, writing. My great favorite, the Lord of the Rings, of course, took decades to complete - and the Silmarillion was never finished. The Oxford Companion to Food, similarly, has been in the works for twenty years, groaning slowly towards completion. The finished product, however, was worth the wait. This is a terrific reference.

It's not that Davidson has produced the most comprehensive food reference possible. The entries are often incomplete in an objective sense, and as the author notes in introduction, "there were to be no recipes, and there are none". But the breadth and of Davidson's work, and the unexpected directions in which he takes entries more than make up for any shortcomings. Take, for example, his inclusion of "Noah's Ark", and his short musing on what the inhabitants might have done for food - or his description of the combat between two hotels for title to the veritable Sachertorte in the early 19th century. These aren't meant to be part an encyclopedic collection of everything about food, but things one particular man found interesting, and I think the final product is better for it.

This isn't to say that The Oxford Companion to Food isn't good for reference. The number of topics covered is impressive, and Davidson even squeezes in an entry on our favorite ortolan, noting that Alexander Dumas favored drowning them in vinegar to killing them otherwise. To tell you the truth, however, I still think the best part of the whole book is the extremely full bibliography. Ever needed to find out who wrote The Confectioner's Oracle? - I don't, but the answer is William Gunter. For information of that kind on hand at all times, ready for dipping into at random, I'm willing to pay the cover price of $49.95. And you should too.

What I'm eating this week

So, it turns out that shopping in a Japanese supermarket is harder than it looks. I thought I was doing well by looking for a fish logo when I needed bonito flakes for the basic Japanese stock (dashi), but that's less helpful when there are 8 tubs of fish logo-ed flakes of one sort or another in a row, all shouting indescipherable Japanese slogans in the same lurid purples and pinks After a quick check of the notes I had brought along, I found the ones without sesame seeds, or peppers, or strange other things i didn't know anything about. From there, it was a pretty straightforward thing to find the Aka (Red) miso, and not the Red miso with all sorts of things simmered as well, or the white miso that looks more beige than white. I'm still not sure all the ingredients I got were the right ones, but they'll have to do.

All the above makes pretty clear that my theme for the week is Japanese food, and specifically miso. I'm going to brush it on salmon, and broil it till crisp - and eat that with miso soup made of dashi and miso. I've got some firm tofu to brush with more miso and grill with mushrooms, to be eaten with short grain japanese brown rice seasoned with miso. If I need it, there will also be miso soup with udon and mushrooms and kale. Sure, that's probably too much miso for one week, but that kind of immersion is probably a good way to start. I'll report back on my experiment next week.