日本の正月の主役である餅を記述
Rice takes prized, symbolic yearend form
Mochi is the most important dish on Japan's New Year menu — just be careful how you eat it
By MAKIKO ITOH
Special to The Japan Times
Shōgatsu (New Year's) is the most important holiday on the Japanese calendar, and the dishes associated with it are laden with symbolic meaning. While the colorful foods of osechi, packed attractively in jūbako (stacking bento boxes), are the flamboyant attention-catchers of the New Year's feast, the quiet star of the show and the food with the most historic and spiritual significance is mochi.
One classic way to eat mochi is as isobe-mochi, square cakes coated in dark soy sauce and wrapped in nori =pic
Mochi is made from mochi-mai, a type of rice known as "glutinous" or "sweet" in English. This short-grain rice is much stickier than the medium-grain uruchi-mai rice that's standard in Japanese cuisine.
Traditionally, mochi-mai was considered to be more desirable than uruchi-mai, and the pounded cake form, mochi, was a highly prized luxury food only affordable to the ruling classes. That's because mochi-mai yields are low, and quite a lot of it is needed to make mochi cakes.
In a sense, mochi is a concentrated version of the food that is revered above all others in Japan: rice.
There are written accounts from the Nara Period (710-794) of mochi as a sacred food. One tale recounts the story of a man who tried to use a mochi cake as a target for archery practice. When he hit the mochi, it magically turned into a white swan and flew away, and shortly thereafter all the rice paddies in the area dried up, causing people to starve. The message is that rice, and the products made from it, should never be wasted.
The first recorded accounts of mochi being used as part of the New Year's festivities comes from the Heian period (794-1185). To the nobles of the Imperial court, the long strands of fresh mochi were thought to symbolize long life, and the hardness of dried mochi was thought to make one's teeth tougher and more durable — good teeth being critical to one's health and well-being. There's even an account of mochi at New Year's in "The Tale of Genji," the oldest novel in the Japanese language.
The most important symbolic New Year's mochi is the kagami-mochi, a decorated stack of two rounded mochi cakes that is put on display. The name, which means "mirror mochi," comes from its shape, which is supposed to be like the round bronze mirrors used by the aristocracy for centuries. (Another theory holds that it looks like a human heart).
The kagami-mochi is usually put out for display on Dec. 28, because the number eight is considered to be an auspicious number in Japanese numerology, and never on the 29th, because the number nine can be read as ku ("suffering"). Some people choose to put out their kagami-mochi on the Taian ("big luck") day closest to the end of the year.
While the kagami-mochi is mainly a display piece, mochi is also the only source of starch allowed during the first three to seven days of the New Year's festivities. (Nowadays a lot of people break with this tradition and start eating regular rice as early as Jan. 2, which is a bit of a shame.)
Besides all the symbolic significance of eating mochi, this traditionally gave a break to the cook of the household too, since she (and it was usually a she) didn't have to prepare and cook the rice, once a significant chore.
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