It is a gadget that accompanied me for years: a small silicone USB key of about 8 cm which resumed line for line the elongated shape and the orange yellow color of an ebi tempura – the name that The Japanese give this emblematic dish of Japanese cuisine: a simple fried shrimp tail coated with a slight crispy dough. Non -edible, bruising on the right and left from the bottom of my pocket, she had no other use than to store some gigabytes of photos and utility documents. Found on an online sales site, the tool – in addition to revealing to the world my attraction for accessories of bad taste – had the particularity of arouse, with each of its outings, its small effect: sometimes, it was the curiosity and adhesion, sometimes a form of misunderstanding and rejection.
In my mind, at the time, on the contrary, it symbolized all the interest that I had in Japanese culinary culture and in the way it was transposed, in a cute manner, in the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki and Ghibli studio. As an enlightened amateur, I especially associate my dummy shrimp with a method of frying vegetables, fish and crustaceans – called “in tempura” -, very popular in Japanese bistros, and which we use to accompany the Soba noodles ( buckwheat), Udon noodles (wheat flour) or tendon, on a simple bowl of rice.
But it was clear that, for many of my interlocutors, the sight of this crustacean with the shiny appearance returned more to the image of a fatty and indigestible dish. The fault, I was explained to me, to the bad experiences encountered in the vast majority of Japanese treaty restaurants that are found in France, where the supply of traditional food is sometimes a bit stereotypical, even misguided – and where the tempura are Most of the time full of oil and cooked in a hurry, between a bowl of salad with vinegar cabbage, frozen yakitoris skewers and a pair of inexpensive sushi. Something told me, deep down – and although I had never set foot in Japan before – that the tempura have not yet been recognized, here in France, at their fair value.
Small golden treasures
This summer, the tempuras returned to haunt me. In Tempura, an Akiko Ohku film released indoors at the end of July, the most famous Japanese fried fries appear on the screen by small spontaneous touches. In Tokyo, we follow the daily life of Mitsuko, a young single woman who, while waiting to be able to invite for the first time a boy at home, refine her different tempura recipes every day. At work in her small kitchen, we admire the languor of her measured gestures and all the application she puts in producing her little golden treasures – which we imagine crisp on the surface but always tender on the interior. In filigree, we believe we can guess all the nobility that the Japanese confer on these small cooked dishes; And how they can serve as a medium to transmit attention or a feeling.
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