That's interesting about "Turkish rice." In Mexico, there are tacos called tacos árabes, literally "Arab tacos," which are made with pork. Sounds weird, considering the Muslim ban on pork, but of course it's important to understand that not all Arabs are Muslim, and the Arabs who first served tacos árabes were Lebanese Christian immigrants to Mexico.
Well some of the original tacos arabes were made with lamb as well. This of course would eventually become al pastor and adobada tacos made from pork with corn tortillas instead of pita bread.
@@valmarsiglia Yes, there are lots of Lebanese christians, but I'll bet pork dishes would be hard to find in Beirut, even among the Christians.. Doesn't mean they didn't sell pork tacos in Mexico, of course... 😁
I think for Japanese curry, it's actually the influence of Queen Victoria that led British Navy to adopt it as part of their food, and quite a number of Japanese military officer went to Britain as part of their training, leading to introduction of Curry in Japan. That's why the method of cooking is similar to a stew rather to an indian curry.
The Portuguese influence on Japanese food is actually seen despite their expulsion. The tradition of having fried fish became tempura, which is now as integral to Japanese cuisine as soba or sushi. Still not used to the idea of serving both rice and spaghetti in one dish. There is also a version of “Asian” western food in Hong Kong which incorporates Chinese ingredients and western techniques and vice versa. And Portuguese gave us egg tarts from Macau and Hong Kong and beyond. Basically a version of crème burle in an edible shell.
yep also the Portuguese introduced one of the first breads or in this case cake that Japan encountered from the west is Bolo de Castela which the Japanese just call Castella which is still made today and one of the very first makers in Japan this year celebrated 400 years of making said cake.
My exploration into my grandmothers Portuguese side led me to Japan. For better or for worse I appreciate the Portuguese history with Japan. Every culture brings some good and some bad so I am happy to take them both.
Also, don't forget about Korea's counterpart in yangsik, as opposed to hansik (in contrast to the foodways of its native minorities the Jeju islanders & the Jaegaseung, both quite different from Korean food)
Hong kong has the same , western style food, every asian country that has western influence does this. This can be said about asian food in america. Some Chinese dishes in America are not served in China
What makes Japanese Yoshoku unique is that it has developed to suit the Japanese palate since the 1870s as a result of extensive cultural exchanges with Western countries.
And curry itself was introduced in the Navy as a dish to address the problem of beriberi among sailors. One of the inducements for enlistment was unlimited white rice; the more refined rice was, the higher class it was considered. Milling rice, however, removed the part of the rice containing thiamine. Navy curry, adapted from British curry made from curry powder, supplied the thiamine missing from the rice-only diet some sailors ate. There is an article on the adoption of curry in Japan on the Atlas Obscura website.
@@seanmalloy7249 I would have thought it was all the vegetables that go into the dish that addressed the beri beri. I hadn't know about curry powder being supplemented with thiamine.
This is one of your best videos, great topic, I learned a lot about Japanese food which I could kind of see myself but never had it articulated and explained in an interesting way. Your video is crafted well with dynamic editing, b-roll, actual on site boots on the ground food tasting, I watched 100%, thanks!
When looking at the title, I'd have thought you'd be covering some of Japan's minority foodways such as Ryukyuan & Ainu plus Hachijo, but yoshoku does (with tragic historical reasons folded in) have a counterpart in Korea known as yangsik (in contrast to hansik & those of Korea's native minorities such as the Jaegaseung & Jeju islanders, quite different from Korean food that's often known). In any case, yangsik is just as fascinating as yoshoku & can often be found in bunsik places
Doria, the casserole rice dish also exists in Cantonese/Hong Kong Cafe cuisine. Doria also is taken from a potato dish called gratin where the potatoes are replaced with rice
Great episode! We could get this type of food in HK when I was a child (90s). My Japanese friend told me the curry became common after WWII as the returning service men would eat it regularly as it was easier to cook in large quantities than traditional Japanese food. Did a bit of googling and it seems that there is truth to it.
Tonkatsu, are amazing.(I specificaly prefer the irekatsu variation ) I like that they are served with salad or cabbage. They even have some sort of tonkatsu who looked like cordon bleu, with cheese and ham on the inside. Also culinary speaking, Nagasaki is really interesting. They are a lot of western and chinese influence here. Like for exemple, they do a special dessert, castella (カステラ ) but they import it before the sakoku (the isolationist policy). So technicaly it's a yoshoku dish but it's was introduced before the meiji era where yoshoku where invented. Even more strange is that Portuguese today didn't do this meal ^^ (but a couple of mixed portugo-japanese tried to reintroduce it in the mid 90s ) It's so fascinating to me.
I think some of the most interesting named food in Japan are Hambaagu and Hambaaga, which sounds pretty similar, but referencing two eras of western food that have gone through changes throughout history, the Hamburg Steak and the Hamburger
Thank for your beautiful and very informative footage! Here in Germany (maybe in all of Europe) industry is trying to establish „Asia Food“: instant noodles with a thickened curry sauce or the same noodles with a thickened sweet chili sause. The Japanese definitely did a better job with Yoshuku!
Thank you! I loved how you gave us a background for why these dishes exist. I found it particularly interesting how beef was not a regular part of the Japanese diet until the Meiji restoration and within roughly one hundred years Japan is now responsible for some of the most highly prized beef in the world. Thank
Food is moreso representative of history and our journey rather than tradition. We experience food with flavor, texture, and smell but also the memories associated with it. If we confine ourselves by being overly concerned with tradition, then we might rob ourselves of creating a new memory by clinging to the old.
It was great to hear about the earlier versions of these dishes. I did not expect this video would be about yoshoku though, since I think a lot of people who have an interest in japan already know about it. I was expecting something niche like some form of fermented soy/vegetables that is only eaten in a small town because the dish has almost died out. Or insects or konowata (fermented sea cucumber guts).
Great video! It really showcases something I always loved about food but couldn't put into words until recently, and that's how much of a culture's stories can be told by their food. The context, ingredients, techniques, history, and ideas that accumulate collectively over time to culminate in a particular preparation that cannot be found anywhere else. Sampling a culture's authentic food has become one of the main reasons I travel now.
I stumbled on Yoshoku cuisine by chance in my area. Quickly became obsessed with Tarako Spaghetti and trying to do the same type of reimagining with my cambodian and thai food.
Very well thought out video. Reminds me a lot of Hawaii and its seemingly endless melting pot of ethnicities, cultural beliefs, and the tasty food that came with or was born from it. Saimin, manapua, and meat jun are just a few that come to mind.
the hamburg steak was actualy most likely introduced by the dutch as they are the only people that both refered to the Buttelle (as it is called in Hamburg itself) as Hamburg meatballs (fried midsiced meatballs preserved using onions and pepper and fried outer crust) , in distinction to Königsberg Meatballs (a large cooked meatball preserved in an barrel of slightly acidic sauce for long see voyages) and Swedish meatballs (small meatballs small enough to be frozen using ice and prepared "fresh" on a ship), and had access to japan.
I honestly can’t help but be a bit jealous of places outside America with their culture, cuisine and mostly their transportation. Like I just see all those people walking in cities that aren’t built for cars, having access to walk. My town doesn’t even have sidewalks in most areas and it’s just embarrassing to me and should be to our country as well. I’m not some weaboo or anything, 😂, I just don’t get how states like mine don’t have sidewalks, and yell at us for not driving or using bikes near ditches that are like 5 feet deep 🤨
From rural America, just visited Japan. Being in rural America is so depressing I live in a town of pop 48,000 people. We have more pollution here than Tokyo Japan, one of the largest cities in the world. It’s a damn shame. I even felt way safer in Tokyo than in my small town.
Great insights into Japanese cuisine with relevance to Japanese history and how its food culture is shaped over the years. Nice video editing, pace, and presentation too! Good job!
Your videos are amazing! Very high production quality for such a small channel. As someone who loves cooking and history this channel is the perfect mix. Keep doing what you're doing and you're going to be big! (Like Tasting History grew a lot as well).
Hey Matthew, I'm loving all your videos and have been binge-watching them lately, especially while on the treadmill. Keep up the great work! If you're ever in the LA area you should come try my family's Mexican restaurant which has been open since 1920.
You make it sound like it's hidden in Japan. LOL. It's everywhere. I think most Japanese still have some sort of washoku vs yoshoku distinction in their head, but also realize that the dishes are very Japanized, despite the non-Japanese sources. The ban on red meat wasn't complete. Japanese in many places ate a lot of game animals. And they had been eating whale and other ocean mammals for a LONG time. BTW, I think in English it would be better to call curry rice, curry and rice. It's basically a curry served with or on rice. As for toruko rice, I would bet it's just some coinage of a Nagasaki restaurant post-war, when they combined the pilaf, the naporitan spaghetti, and the tonkatsu into a meal plate. And Turkey has pilaf dishes. Here in Fukui, in Takefu / Echizen, they did something similar with Boruga Rice. It is omuraisu, pork cutlet, and gravy / brown sauce. There is nothing that mysterious about it. Someone there saw a package of imported Volga Rice and just took the name. It is really more a pseudo-mysterious dish to encourage people to eat a big helping of government-subsidized-farmed rice. Since such dishes are so obviously just recombinations of true traditional yoshoku, there is nothing mysterious whatsoever about them.
One of the most rarely discussed impact of Meiji restoration is the institutionalisation of Shinto religion, a separation between Shinto-Buddhist syncretism. It is done for a lot of things, also to fight off Buddhist dietary restriction. Other "western food" like Tempura (introduced by the Portuguese, along with firearms) are not typically considered "Yoshoku", since they were introduced way earlier during the beginning of Sengoku Jidai era (even before Edo period). Plus, Yoshoku is indeed kind of a very specific introduction period - that Meiji era. They evolved accordingly and becoming kinda "faux western" like Indonesian-western of the 1970s-1990s, which are mostly learned from Japan. The popularity of Hamburg steak and the popularity of the belief that "western people are bigger and stronger because they eat meat", is not a coincidence with the popularity of James H Salisbury's idea of promoting health through meat-eating in early 20th century. His recommended recipe of ground beef steak is named after him "Salisbury Steak" in the US since 1897. Ideas travel and kinda stayed, lagged in a foreign country during the pre-internet era. My parents and grandparents still believe that eating carrots improve eye sight as the British propaganda ministry suggested to the Germans, when they are wary about successful night bombing interception rate by RAF during WW2 - which was due to secret radar technology instead of RAF night fighter pilot's diet. Western food are reappropriated everywhere, in Indonesia, particularly Central Java, we have 'Selat Solo' - a form of Hamburg steak with caramelised onion as the sweet sauce. It was never labelled as "Indonesian food" back then, just like how Spaghetti Neapolitan (Naporitan) sold in Japanese Sogo Dept Store's cafe Chatterbox chain is always labelled "Western Food" instead of "Japanese Western Food". European influence also varies within Asia - Indonesia is not necessarily influenced 100% by the previous colonisers like Dutch, Portuguese, or British. My grandparent's RAF influence (carrot story) obviously reveals their Cantonese Hong Kong background. Then there is also fashionable Japanese obsession with anything French or Britain, depending whether it is Eastern or Western Japan - which is the same story with their electricity grid system.
One of the things that drew me into wanting to know more about Japan when I was younger was their sheer amount of varied cuisine within their culture. All of which look amazingly delicious. Every thing I have had the chance to try has been wonderful, save for a few cheap dishes that were not made well. Food would be a major draw for me if I ever got to visit Japan. XD
Some of the most interesting food that I had in Jaan a few years back was "Italian" food, but not actually Italian, but rather Japanese adaptations of Italian food. Thus making something new.
Great video! Reminds me of Hong Kong's food culture, where some of its quintessential food that you see in their cafes are heavily influenced by the British
At 11m17s, the Doria (sp?) - that looks like a take on, or an inspiration for Coquille Saint-Jacques. While it is traditionally made with scallops, the basic ideas are all there. Thanks for the great content!
The remnants of (specifically) Portuguese influence still sticks around within Japan's yо̄shoku, which in my opinion permeates the cuisine more strongly than the other colonial powers, aside from probably the French. I'm surprised that one of Portugal's contributions, tempura, didn't get a mention.
Tempura is a weird one, cause despite it coming from Portuguese influence, it happened before the Sakoku policy and Meiji Era, so it’s often tagged as washoku.
@@offthemenuyt interesting, I never knew. So that would also extend to a few Japanese bread-based dishes then, like castella cake and all dishes covered in panko? If memory serves, bread itself also came from the Portuguese, and from around the same time.
Thank you for this fascinating video. I'm trying to track down these dishes to see if they're available in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it's hard with the automatic captions to get the spellings. Please be so kind as to proofread and correct them so I can get some of this deliciousness you've introduced me to into my mouth if it's here - I love Japanese curry but several of the other dishes are new to me. (Correcting auto-captions is a blessing for deaf people, too, just so you know.)
The Baked Rice is also done and quite common in Southern China, HK, Malaysia and Singapore. From the seafood one like in the video to chicken and mushroom.
Its interesting, Yoshoku reminds me of American Chinese food, or indeed American Japanese food (or That or Indian, but most especially Chinese) in that it is an entire cuisine based on adapting a foreign food culture to local tastes.
8:07 talking about washoku keeping the most traditional foods of Japan, but using salmon nigiri, a modern addition that only happened in the past 50 years 🙊
I've been fascinated by the Japanese take on western food for many years. This video is the most comprehensive description of yoshoku I've found yet. Great job on the video! I can tell it took a lot of work to make.
My Russian Mom cooks plov a kind of pilav it's the same rice dish without the spices. The rice colorings are from the vegetable (mostly carrots) and meat is taken what ever there is. Since we had our own pigs, it was pig meat. (But the fatter the better.) But the origin is middel east - it like the dumpling - it's kinda everywhere in their own kind (Pilmeni (Russia), Maultaschen(Germany), Ravioli & Tortelloni(Italy), Bao zi (China), Gyoza (Japan), Manty (Kasakhstan), etc. ...)
I love this kind of cultural exchange. The funniest aspect of this kind of western inspired food is that you'd probably get american idiots claiming its cultural appropriation for a white guy to open up a katsu shop, even though its a japanese take of a western cutlet.
Incidentally, something I've been trying to figure out might have something to do with this video's subject matter. In Kamakura there's a little cafe called "Milk Hall" (I ate there three weeks ago). It's featured in a certain manga (Aoi Hana) set in that town and the surrounding area. There's another "Milk Hall" in another manga, this one was a cafeteria in a girl's school where the "ordinary" girls ate lunch (the "elite" girls had their own clubhouse with a dining table). So it occurred to me that the term "Milk Hall" might actually mean something. Google Maps shows something like four in Tokyo, and one in Hokkaido. The ones in Tokyo seem to offer cafeteria type Western dishes, the one in Hokkaido is.. well, sells milk products.. So what exactly WAS a "Milk Hall"? Were there a lot more of them during the Showa era, post-war? Were they anything like the Thai "Cook Shops" in the OTR video?
According to Japanese Wikipedia, they used to serve milk and light meals (and at some point sold newspapers as well). They were popular in the Meiji and Taisho eras and completely disappeared after WW2. The article says that the modern Milk Halls simply use the name. ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%9F%E3%83%AB%E3%82%AF%E3%83%9B%E3%83%BC%E3%83%AB?wprov=sfla1
Most non-Japanese people who don't study the culture don't know that the Japanese drew a metaphorical box around certain dishes and pursue development of them within a specific subgenre of the overall Japanese culinary umbrella.
To be fair the Japanese curry and rice tends to take far more from the British versions of curry than the traditional Indian ones. So Japan eats an imitation of British food which itself is an imitation of Indian food. Its quite cool how food cultures takes form each other
10:28 Turkish rice. Nobody knows.... but isn't it kind of obvious... It's because Turks eat vermicelli rice. I'm pretty sure one of these two things happened: 1) Less likely: Somebody in Nagasaki read about Turks eating rice with vermicilli, and is inspired to serve rice with spaghetti, and name the new dish Turkish rice. It might even have been an accidental invention, and the original creator/name giver really thought that (s)he had recreated a Turkish dish. 2) More likely: After WW2, Japan receive a lot of gratis foodstuffs from USA. One of those foods was spaghetti. There was also a scarcity of traditional Japanese rice in Japan after WW2, and Japanese rice had become a really expensive luxury food (rice imported from USA never became popular, despite being given for free). People started to eat Japanese rice with spaghetti because spaghetti was much cheaper than traditional rice, but they still couldn't force themselves to quit eating traditional Japanese rice entirely. Somebody discovered that Turks also eat rice with pasta, although it is a completely different dish. To make the dish sound more exotic and marketable, and not sound like a poor mans starvation food, the new Japanese dish is renamed to "Turkish rice". Just like we Swedes eat Boston cucumber, a relish invented in 1952 in Sweden, originally made out of leftover foodscraps from making a more traditional pickled Swedish style sliced cucumber preserve ("smörgåsgurka", which was invented in the 1860:s, and was initially called "German cucumber" and similar names, because it originated from German recipes of pickled gherkins, just with a lot of adjustments to better suit Swedish preferences and availability of ingredients, Sweden started industrial native production of sugar in the 1850's, sugar become really cheap, but was still seen as a luxury food by the social groups that couldn't afford it previously, and sugar consumption in Sweden was at its peak, with Swedes adding enormous amounts of sugar into everything they ate). "Bostongurka" somewhat resembles US relishes, and everything comming from USA had a good reputation in Sweden in 1952 [ US products became mythical, mostly because the less war torn Sweden, unlike many other parts of Western Europe, didn't get access to much US products and could only look in envy as neighbouring countries got access to a lot of stuff made in USA; finally, when a lot of US made goods started to get imported to Sweden in the 1960's (because US wanted Swedish steel, copper, cars, machinery and toolery), Swedes discovered, contrary to the previous hype, that all the imported US made products was complete garbage compared to Swedish made products, and the Swedish opinion took a complete turn, and "Made in USA" became synonymous with really bad and expensive products, with the exception of cotton products, becsuse no equivalent product was made in Sweden ], so the new Swedish relish was branded after a common geographic name in USA, because it sounded good in marketing.
I love how other nations interpret the food of other cultures, it is not authentic to the nation of origin nor is that even the intent. It's of the nation that invented it, that is a feature not a bug.
There's this video I came across a few days ago. The same thing happened in Thailand, apparentlly - a cuisine based on what Western cuising LOOKED like. In this case, Hainanese cooks working at hotels who opened their own restaurants. th-cam.com/video/JQJiz5CfTxQ/w-d-xo.html OTR is, by the way, my absolute favorite food channel.
That's why the taste is waaaaay different than Indian food 😂 It's more sweet and savory rather than spicy, although the warming effects of the spices are still there. They thickened it with French roux as well.
Honestly many of those look like interpretations of early to mid 1900s German cuisine, you can find things like those in the cook books of the post war germanies up until the 80s.
I feel so stupid because I grew up with this food, but I only considered it being “Western food made wrong”. Even when I loved this cuisine I still called it that in my head. It never occurred to me to call it a separate cuisine
Incredible video, but a small detail bugged me, the dutch flag you used is actually luxembourg! I know cos it's my country ahha. But again, great video!
The Dutch flag for much of the era of Sakoku was a tricolour of red, white and light blue. It is the historically appropriate Dutch flag. You can also see he has used period-appropriate flags for Korea, Qing China, and Great Britain, though not for Spain or Portugal. The flag of Luxembourg has a lighter red than the Dutch flag. Are you sure you're a Luxembourger?
Great - AGAIN! Is the story of yakisoba interesting to others? It's a simple Japanese comfort food, but the Japanese see it as so lowly and commonplace that it's next to IMPOSSIBLE to find in the US restaurants owned by Japanese Americans! (a similar US equivalent might be the peanut butter and jelly sandwich! WHO would go to a US restaurant for THAT??? I LOVE YAKISOBA!!!!
10:50 - in Europe, the word "Turkey" used to mean anything foreign or traded from various non-Western Europe countries. The turkey bird is native to the US, but named after the traders that brought it to Europe. I wonder if "Turkish rice" means "foreign-trader rice" in the same way.
Hello, I am from Turkey. Pilaf (or as we call it Pilav) is one of main Turkish side dishes for centuries. We always have beans, meatballs or chicken as a main dish with pilaf. The brown thick sauce looks like Balkanian-Turkish dish called Gulash and/or Yahni. This is also one of the special dishes in Ottoman Empire Cuisine. So i guess, pilaf and sauce part of that dish is inspired by Turkish-Balkanian food. Cheers and smiles… 😋
Is Gyoza (Chinese origin), and Yakiniku (Korean origin), or even Shumai, considered Yōshoku? Not Western, or maybe not as far west? Even tempura has Portuguese influence.
That's interesting about "Turkish rice." In Mexico, there are tacos called tacos árabes, literally "Arab tacos," which are made with pork. Sounds weird, considering the Muslim ban on pork, but of course it's important to understand that not all Arabs are Muslim, and the Arabs who first served tacos árabes were Lebanese Christian immigrants to Mexico.
Well some of the original tacos arabes were made with lamb as well. This of course would eventually become al pastor and adobada tacos made from pork with corn tortillas instead of pita bread.
@@ech4ng Ooh, I'd love to try the lamb version!
@@valmarsiglia Yes, there are lots of Lebanese christians, but I'll bet pork dishes would be hard to find in Beirut, even among the Christians.. Doesn't mean they didn't sell pork tacos in Mexico, of course... 😁
Tacos a la verga too
It probably has to do with the "Arabian style" of preparing the meat, not the entirety of the food.
I think for Japanese curry, it's actually the influence of Queen Victoria that led British Navy to adopt it as part of their food, and quite a number of Japanese military officer went to Britain as part of their training, leading to introduction of Curry in Japan. That's why the method of cooking is similar to a stew rather to an indian curry.
The Portuguese influence on Japanese food is actually seen despite their expulsion. The tradition of having fried fish became tempura, which is now as integral to Japanese cuisine as soba or sushi.
Still not used to the idea of serving both rice and spaghetti in one dish.
There is also a version of “Asian” western food in Hong Kong which incorporates Chinese ingredients and western techniques and vice versa.
And Portuguese gave us egg tarts from Macau and Hong Kong and beyond. Basically a version of crème burle in an edible shell.
yep also the Portuguese introduced one of the first breads or in this case cake that Japan encountered from the west is Bolo de Castela which the Japanese just call Castella which is still made today and one of the very first makers in Japan this year celebrated 400 years of making said cake.
My exploration into my grandmothers Portuguese side led me to Japan. For better or for worse I appreciate the Portuguese history with Japan. Every culture brings some good and some bad so I am happy to take them both.
Yoshoku is everywhere in Southeast Asia, and particularly in the Philippines, where sushi isn't necessarily the go-to dish in restaurants.
They're the gateway drug into Japanese cuisine.
Also, don't forget about Korea's counterpart in yangsik, as opposed to hansik (in contrast to the foodways of its native minorities the Jeju islanders & the Jaegaseung, both quite different from Korean food)
I think it's basically what they serve in Tokyo Tokyo.
Hong kong has the same , western style food, every asian country that has western influence does this. This can be said about asian food in america. Some Chinese dishes in America are not served in China
What makes Japanese Yoshoku unique is that it has developed to suit the Japanese palate since the 1870s as a result of extensive cultural exchanges with Western countries.
Love these kind of videos that teach history through food. It get a greater appreciation of the food and culture behind it.
Most curry is eaten with rice, but you hear "curry" and think Indian cuisine, yet you hear "curry rice" and know it's Japanese cuisine.
And curry itself was introduced in the Navy as a dish to address the problem of beriberi among sailors. One of the inducements for enlistment was unlimited white rice; the more refined rice was, the higher class it was considered. Milling rice, however, removed the part of the rice containing thiamine. Navy curry, adapted from British curry made from curry powder, supplied the thiamine missing from the rice-only diet some sailors ate. There is an article on the adoption of curry in Japan on the Atlas Obscura website.
@@seanmalloy7249 I would have thought it was all the vegetables that go into the dish that addressed the beri beri. I hadn't know about curry powder being supplemented with thiamine.
This is one of your best videos, great topic, I learned a lot about Japanese food which I could kind of see myself but never had it articulated and explained in an interesting way. Your video is crafted well with dynamic editing, b-roll, actual on site boots on the ground food tasting, I watched 100%, thanks!
When looking at the title, I'd have thought you'd be covering some of Japan's minority foodways such as Ryukyuan & Ainu plus Hachijo, but yoshoku does (with tragic historical reasons folded in) have a counterpart in Korea known as yangsik (in contrast to hansik & those of Korea's native minorities such as the Jaegaseung & Jeju islanders, quite different from Korean food that's often known). In any case, yangsik is just as fascinating as yoshoku & can often be found in bunsik places
I’d love to make an Ainu video someday, would probably have to travel to Hokkaido for that one.
Doria, the casserole rice dish also exists in Cantonese/Hong Kong Cafe cuisine. Doria also is taken from a potato dish called gratin where the potatoes are replaced with rice
Doria is just a rice au grain dish. So in that case, the Japanese just invented a pseudo-Italian name for a known dish.
Great episode! We could get this type of food in HK when I was a child (90s). My Japanese friend told me the curry became common after WWII as the returning service men would eat it regularly as it was easier to cook in large quantities than traditional Japanese food. Did a bit of googling and it seems that there is truth to it.
Tonkatsu, are amazing.(I specificaly prefer the irekatsu variation ) I like that they are served with salad or cabbage. They even have some sort of tonkatsu who looked like cordon bleu, with cheese and ham on the inside.
Also culinary speaking, Nagasaki is really interesting. They are a lot of western and chinese influence here. Like for exemple, they do a special dessert, castella (カステラ ) but they import it before the sakoku (the isolationist policy). So technicaly it's a yoshoku dish but it's was introduced before the meiji era where yoshoku where invented. Even more strange is that Portuguese today didn't do this meal ^^ (but a couple of mixed portugo-japanese tried to reintroduce it in the mid 90s )
It's so fascinating to me.
The Portuguese do eat castella, it is called pão de ló
I think some of the most interesting named food in Japan are Hambaagu and Hambaaga, which sounds pretty similar, but referencing two eras of western food that have gone through changes throughout history, the Hamburg Steak and the Hamburger
Thank for your beautiful and very informative footage! Here in Germany (maybe in all of Europe) industry is trying to establish „Asia Food“: instant noodles with a thickened curry sauce or the same noodles with a thickened sweet chili sause. The Japanese definitely did a better job with Yoshuku!
Thank you! I loved how you gave us a background for why these dishes exist. I found it particularly interesting how beef was not a regular part of the Japanese diet until the Meiji restoration and within roughly one hundred years Japan is now responsible for some of the most highly prized beef in the world. Thank
Great video, very in depth, almost reminded me of an episode of no reservations
I love Yoshoku so much, thank you Matthew for explaining the history!
I hope this video pops of, came for a food video, stayed for a well told history lesson
Food is moreso representative of history and our journey rather than tradition. We experience food with flavor, texture, and smell but also the memories associated with it. If we confine ourselves by being overly concerned with tradition, then we might rob ourselves of creating a new memory by clinging to the old.
It was great to hear about the earlier versions of these dishes. I did not expect this video would be about yoshoku though, since I think a lot of people who have an interest in japan already know about it.
I was expecting something niche like some form of fermented soy/vegetables that is only eaten in a small town because the dish has almost died out. Or insects or konowata (fermented sea cucumber guts).
Great video! It really showcases something I always loved about food but couldn't put into words until recently, and that's how much of a culture's stories can be told by their food. The context, ingredients, techniques, history, and ideas that accumulate collectively over time to culminate in a particular preparation that cannot be found anywhere else.
Sampling a culture's authentic food has become one of the main reasons I travel now.
The Doria near the end kinda reminded me a little of Spanish Paella with a Gratin twist to it
TO me an American, it's just a rice au gratin made with a mornay sauce.
I stumbled on Yoshoku cuisine by chance in my area. Quickly became obsessed with Tarako Spaghetti and trying to do the same type of reimagining with my cambodian and thai food.
wonderfully produced video. seriously thank you for this gem.
Really interesting. Thanks ! Reminds me of the Vittles food documentation project.
Very well thought out video. Reminds me a lot of Hawaii and its seemingly endless melting pot of ethnicities, cultural beliefs, and the tasty food that came with or was born from it. Saimin, manapua, and meat jun are just a few that come to mind.
The edit with the maps and historical material is very good. Like these kind of videos
This is a brilliant video, really great editing and info.
the hamburg steak was actualy most likely introduced by the dutch as they are the only people that both refered to the Buttelle (as it is called in Hamburg itself) as Hamburg meatballs (fried midsiced meatballs preserved using onions and pepper and fried outer crust) , in distinction to Königsberg Meatballs (a large cooked meatball preserved in an barrel of slightly acidic sauce for long see voyages) and Swedish meatballs (small meatballs small enough to be frozen using ice and prepared "fresh" on a ship), and had access to japan.
What a fantastic video. What I subscribe for. Thank you.
This is quality content. Shapo!!
I honestly can’t help but be a bit jealous of places outside America with their culture, cuisine and mostly their transportation. Like I just see all those people walking in cities that aren’t built for cars, having access to walk. My town doesn’t even have sidewalks in most areas and it’s just embarrassing to me and should be to our country as well. I’m not some weaboo or anything, 😂, I just don’t get how states like mine don’t have sidewalks, and yell at us for not driving or using bikes near ditches that are like 5 feet deep 🤨
I loved this video too, I learned stuff about Japan that I didn’t know before, so thank you!
From rural America, just visited Japan. Being in rural America is so depressing I live in a town of pop 48,000 people. We have more pollution here than Tokyo Japan, one of the largest cities in the world. It’s a damn shame. I even felt way safer in Tokyo than in my small town.
Tokyo had less homeless people and crackheads too.
Great insights into Japanese cuisine with relevance to Japanese history and how its food culture is shaped over the years. Nice video editing, pace, and presentation too! Good job!
My understanding is that Japanese "curry" introduced via Britain, through the Navy. Japanology did a documentary on this.
Very informative and interesting documentary. Good job 👍
The curry powder first used in Japan was Madras curry powder, which itself was developed for English consumption.
Dude these videos are excellent 👌👌👌
Very interesting video, great work!
Your videos are amazing! Very high production quality for such a small channel. As someone who loves cooking and history this channel is the perfect mix. Keep doing what you're doing and you're going to be big! (Like Tasting History grew a lot as well).
Hey Matthew, I'm loving all your videos and have been binge-watching them lately, especially while on the treadmill. Keep up the great work! If you're ever in the LA area you should come try my family's Mexican restaurant which has been open since 1920.
So interesting watching (but sometimes I just listen) to your videos. Thank y'all for sharing !
great video, thanks!
It all looks very tasty- thanks! 😀
You make it sound like it's hidden in Japan. LOL. It's everywhere. I think most Japanese still have some sort of washoku vs yoshoku distinction in their head, but also realize that the dishes are very Japanized, despite the non-Japanese sources. The ban on red meat wasn't complete. Japanese in many places ate a lot of game animals. And they had been eating whale and other ocean mammals for a LONG time. BTW, I think in English it would be better to call curry rice, curry and rice. It's basically a curry served with or on rice. As for toruko rice, I would bet it's just some coinage of a Nagasaki restaurant post-war, when they combined the pilaf, the naporitan spaghetti, and the tonkatsu into a meal plate. And Turkey has pilaf dishes. Here in Fukui, in Takefu / Echizen, they did something similar with Boruga Rice. It is omuraisu, pork cutlet, and gravy / brown sauce. There is nothing that mysterious about it. Someone there saw a package of imported Volga Rice and just took the name. It is really more a pseudo-mysterious dish to encourage people to eat a big helping of government-subsidized-farmed rice. Since such dishes are so obviously just recombinations of true traditional yoshoku, there is nothing mysterious whatsoever about them.
I think a lot of young Japanese people would be surprised if you told them that nikujaga is youshoku.
One of the most rarely discussed impact of Meiji restoration is the institutionalisation of Shinto religion, a separation between Shinto-Buddhist syncretism. It is done for a lot of things, also to fight off Buddhist dietary restriction.
Other "western food" like Tempura (introduced by the Portuguese, along with firearms) are not typically considered "Yoshoku", since they were introduced way earlier during the beginning of Sengoku Jidai era (even before Edo period).
Plus, Yoshoku is indeed kind of a very specific introduction period - that Meiji era. They evolved accordingly and becoming kinda "faux western" like Indonesian-western of the 1970s-1990s, which are mostly learned from Japan. The popularity of Hamburg steak and the popularity of the belief that "western people are bigger and stronger because they eat meat", is not a coincidence with the popularity of James H Salisbury's idea of promoting health through meat-eating in early 20th century. His recommended recipe of ground beef steak is named after him "Salisbury Steak" in the US since 1897.
Ideas travel and kinda stayed, lagged in a foreign country during the pre-internet era. My parents and grandparents still believe that eating carrots improve eye sight as the British propaganda ministry suggested to the Germans, when they are wary about successful night bombing interception rate by RAF during WW2 - which was due to secret radar technology instead of RAF night fighter pilot's diet.
Western food are reappropriated everywhere, in Indonesia, particularly Central Java, we have 'Selat Solo' - a form of Hamburg steak with caramelised onion as the sweet sauce. It was never labelled as "Indonesian food" back then, just like how Spaghetti Neapolitan (Naporitan) sold in Japanese Sogo Dept Store's cafe Chatterbox chain is always labelled "Western Food" instead of "Japanese Western Food".
European influence also varies within Asia - Indonesia is not necessarily influenced 100% by the previous colonisers like Dutch, Portuguese, or British. My grandparent's RAF influence (carrot story) obviously reveals their Cantonese Hong Kong background. Then there is also fashionable Japanese obsession with anything French or Britain, depending whether it is Eastern or Western Japan - which is the same story with their electricity grid system.
its a longshot but in chile "arab rice" is rice with tiny toasted noodles. mixing pilaf with napolitan noodles might be the turkish thing.
Well done...great insight!
One of the things that drew me into wanting to know more about Japan when I was younger was their sheer amount of varied cuisine within their culture. All of which look amazingly delicious. Every thing I have had the chance to try has been wonderful, save for a few cheap dishes that were not made well. Food would be a major draw for me if I ever got to visit Japan. XD
Some of the most interesting food that I had in Jaan a few years back was "Italian" food, but not actually Italian, but rather Japanese adaptations of Italian food. Thus making something new.
Great video! Reminds me of Hong Kong's food culture, where some of its quintessential food that you see in their cafes are heavily influenced by the British
Man your video is so good the way you speak is just perfect ✨✨✨✨
At 11m17s, the Doria (sp?) - that looks like a take on, or an inspiration for Coquille Saint-Jacques. While it is traditionally made with scallops, the basic ideas are all there. Thanks for the great content!
Shanghai also has their own version of western cuisine that developed before the turn of the century.
The remnants of (specifically) Portuguese influence still sticks around within Japan's yо̄shoku, which in my opinion permeates the cuisine more strongly than the other colonial powers, aside from probably the French. I'm surprised that one of Portugal's contributions, tempura, didn't get a mention.
Tempura is a weird one, cause despite it coming from Portuguese influence, it happened before the Sakoku policy and Meiji Era, so it’s often tagged as washoku.
@@offthemenuyt interesting, I never knew. So that would also extend to a few Japanese bread-based dishes then, like castella cake and all dishes covered in panko? If memory serves, bread itself also came from the Portuguese, and from around the same time.
Thank you for this fascinating video. I'm trying to track down these dishes to see if they're available in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it's hard with the automatic captions to get the spellings. Please be so kind as to proofread and correct them so I can get some of this deliciousness you've introduced me to into my mouth if it's here - I love Japanese curry but several of the other dishes are new to me. (Correcting auto-captions is a blessing for deaf people, too, just so you know.)
The Baked Rice is also done and quite common in Southern China, HK, Malaysia and Singapore. From the seafood one like in the video to chicken and mushroom.
Its interesting, Yoshoku reminds me of American Chinese food, or indeed American Japanese food (or That or Indian, but most especially Chinese) in that it is an entire cuisine based on adapting a foreign food culture to local tastes.
Food reflects history and societies. I love that you embrace this!
8:07 talking about washoku keeping the most traditional foods of Japan, but using salmon nigiri, a modern addition that only happened in the past 50 years 🙊
I've been fascinated by the Japanese take on western food for many years. This video is the most comprehensive description of yoshoku I've found yet. Great job on the video! I can tell it took a lot of work to make.
My Russian Mom cooks plov a kind of pilav it's the same rice dish without the spices. The rice colorings are from the vegetable (mostly carrots) and meat is taken what ever there is. Since we had our own pigs, it was pig meat. (But the fatter the better.) But the origin is middel east - it like the dumpling - it's kinda everywhere in their own kind (Pilmeni (Russia), Maultaschen(Germany), Ravioli & Tortelloni(Italy), Bao zi (China), Gyoza (Japan), Manty (Kasakhstan), etc. ...)
I love this kind of cultural exchange. The funniest aspect of this kind of western inspired food is that you'd probably get american idiots claiming its cultural appropriation for a white guy to open up a katsu shop, even though its a japanese take of a western cutlet.
I love your content. History fan, food fan, info graphic fan
Interesting and well thought out video. Thanks
Incidentally, something I've been trying to figure out might have something to do with this video's subject matter. In Kamakura there's a little cafe called "Milk Hall" (I ate there three weeks ago). It's featured in a certain manga (Aoi Hana) set in that town and the surrounding area. There's another "Milk Hall" in another manga, this one was a cafeteria in a girl's school where the "ordinary" girls ate lunch (the "elite" girls had their own clubhouse with a dining table). So it occurred to me that the term "Milk Hall" might actually mean something. Google Maps shows something like four in Tokyo, and one in Hokkaido. The ones in Tokyo seem to offer cafeteria type Western dishes, the one in Hokkaido is.. well, sells milk products.. So what exactly WAS a "Milk Hall"? Were there a lot more of them during the Showa era, post-war? Were they anything like the Thai "Cook Shops" in the OTR video?
According to Japanese Wikipedia, they used to serve milk and light meals (and at some point sold newspapers as well). They were popular in the Meiji and Taisho eras and completely disappeared after WW2. The article says that the modern Milk Halls simply use the name.
ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%9F%E3%83%AB%E3%82%AF%E3%83%9B%E3%83%BC%E3%83%AB?wprov=sfla1
@@fiskehandler Thanks! So they were really a thing back in the day.
I love when people point out the contradictory parts of different human cultures. We are such a weird world.
Comment for support. I like your content, keep it up!
Yoshoku is a secret?
Most non-Japanese people who don't study the culture don't know that the Japanese drew a metaphorical box around certain dishes and pursue development of them within a specific subgenre of the overall Japanese culinary umbrella.
For a moment I thought this video would be about Shojin Ryori.
I learned something. Great video!
To be fair the Japanese curry and rice tends to take far more from the British versions of curry than the traditional Indian ones. So Japan eats an imitation of British food which itself is an imitation of Indian food. Its quite cool how food cultures takes form each other
really enjoyed this video, thank you for the history lesson!
10:28 Turkish rice. Nobody knows.... but isn't it kind of obvious...
It's because Turks eat vermicelli rice.
I'm pretty sure one of these two things happened:
1) Less likely: Somebody in Nagasaki read about Turks eating rice with vermicilli, and is inspired to serve rice with spaghetti, and name the new dish Turkish rice. It might even have been an accidental invention, and the original creator/name giver really thought that (s)he had recreated a Turkish dish.
2) More likely: After WW2, Japan receive a lot of gratis foodstuffs from USA. One of those foods was spaghetti. There was also a scarcity of traditional Japanese rice in Japan after WW2, and Japanese rice had become a really expensive luxury food (rice imported from USA never became popular, despite being given for free). People started to eat Japanese rice with spaghetti because spaghetti was much cheaper than traditional rice, but they still couldn't force themselves to quit eating traditional Japanese rice entirely. Somebody discovered that Turks also eat rice with pasta, although it is a completely different dish. To make the dish sound more exotic and marketable, and not sound like a poor mans starvation food, the new Japanese dish is renamed to "Turkish rice". Just like we Swedes eat Boston cucumber, a relish invented in 1952 in Sweden, originally made out of leftover foodscraps from making a more traditional pickled Swedish style sliced cucumber preserve ("smörgåsgurka", which was invented in the 1860:s, and was initially called "German cucumber" and similar names, because it originated from German recipes of pickled gherkins, just with a lot of adjustments to better suit Swedish preferences and availability of ingredients, Sweden started industrial native production of sugar in the 1850's, sugar become really cheap, but was still seen as a luxury food by the social groups that couldn't afford it previously, and sugar consumption in Sweden was at its peak, with Swedes adding enormous amounts of sugar into everything they ate). "Bostongurka" somewhat resembles US relishes, and everything comming from USA had a good reputation in Sweden in 1952 [ US products became mythical, mostly because the less war torn Sweden, unlike many other parts of Western Europe, didn't get access to much US products and could only look in envy as neighbouring countries got access to a lot of stuff made in USA; finally, when a lot of US made goods started to get imported to Sweden in the 1960's (because US wanted Swedish steel, copper, cars, machinery and toolery), Swedes discovered, contrary to the previous hype, that all the imported US made products was complete garbage compared to Swedish made products, and the Swedish opinion took a complete turn, and "Made in USA" became synonymous with really bad and expensive products, with the exception of cotton products, becsuse no equivalent product was made in Sweden ], so the new Swedish relish was branded after a common geographic name in USA, because it sounded good in marketing.
Great video!
I love how other nations interpret the food of other cultures, it is not authentic to the nation of origin nor is that even the intent. It's of the nation that invented it, that is a feature not a bug.
love this channel justy found it
There's this video I came across a few days ago. The same thing happened in Thailand, apparentlly - a cuisine based on what Western cuising LOOKED like. In this case, Hainanese cooks working at hotels who opened their own restaurants. th-cam.com/video/JQJiz5CfTxQ/w-d-xo.html OTR is, by the way, my absolute favorite food channel.
Your videos are addicting
Hayashi beef or hashed beef combines tomato, demi glace, and onions.
so japanese curry is the japanese interpretation of the british interpretation of indian food.
That's why the taste is waaaaay different than Indian food 😂 It's more sweet and savory rather than spicy, although the warming effects of the spices are still there.
They thickened it with French roux as well.
@7:19 does anyone know what that little boy is eating on the skewer?
What a cool multidimensional video!
Great vid! I subscribed
It’s interesting how 洋食 is considered as lesser known… I always assumed people would know about this
its only unheard of In west, yosoku is what Koreans ate for long time as Japanese food or light western food(경양식)
Honestly many of those look like interpretations of early to mid 1900s German cuisine, you can find things like those in the cook books of the post war germanies up until the 80s.
I feel so stupid because I grew up with this food, but I only considered it being “Western food made wrong”. Even when I loved this cuisine I still called it that in my head. It never occurred to me to call it a separate cuisine
Baked rice exists in India, inspired from the mac n cheese ofcourse
So its like american chinese dishes
Incredible video, but a small detail bugged me, the dutch flag you used is actually luxembourg! I know cos it's my country ahha. But again, great video!
The Dutch flag for much of the era of Sakoku was a tricolour of red, white and light blue. It is the historically appropriate Dutch flag.
You can also see he has used period-appropriate flags for Korea, Qing China, and Great Britain, though not for Spain or Portugal.
The flag of Luxembourg has a lighter red than the Dutch flag. Are you sure you're a Luxembourger?
@@WiggaMachiavelli oh you're right, I guess I was biased. Thanks for educating me on that.
Great - AGAIN!
Is the story of yakisoba interesting to others? It's a simple Japanese comfort food, but the Japanese see it as so lowly and commonplace that it's next to IMPOSSIBLE to find in the US restaurants owned by Japanese Americans! (a similar US equivalent might be the peanut butter and jelly sandwich! WHO would go to a US restaurant for THAT??? I LOVE YAKISOBA!!!!
10:50 - in Europe, the word "Turkey" used to mean anything foreign or traded from various non-Western Europe countries. The turkey bird is native to the US, but named after the traders that brought it to Europe. I wonder if "Turkish rice" means "foreign-trader rice" in the same way.
A veritable hot pot of ideas..
Hello, I am from Turkey. Pilaf (or as we call it Pilav) is one of main Turkish side dishes for centuries. We always have beans, meatballs or chicken as a main dish with pilaf. The brown thick sauce looks like Balkanian-Turkish dish called Gulash and/or Yahni. This is also one of the special dishes in Ottoman Empire Cuisine. So i guess, pilaf and sauce part of that dish is inspired by Turkish-Balkanian food. Cheers and smiles… 😋
Is the dish you are talking about a variation on Hungarian goulash or is the name a coincidence?
Is Gyoza (Chinese origin), and Yakiniku (Korean origin), or even Shumai, considered Yōshoku? Not Western, or maybe not as far west? Even tempura has Portuguese influence.
Like the Johnny Harris editing video style !
Yoshoku is basically the Japanese equivalent of American "chinese" food
This is so cool and epic
A Johnny Harris video beat for beat...
You’re the best man
It was called a hamburger steak then and is still called a hamburger steak today. I don't know how that isn't painfully obvious to anyone