SPRINGITME IN PIEMONTE – TENCH PROJECT

Two years a go I spent a month traveling in Japan and tracking down several foods I found particularly interesting. One of the highlights of my trip was the work I did around funazushi, which has been documented in an article I wrote for “Slowfood”.

Funazushi is the ancestor of today’s sushi. In a bizarre reversal of roles, the grandfather of sushi was all about the rice rather than the fish. The rice had a peculiar acidulated taste, which came about thanks to a month-long fermentation together with fish.

Funazushi is a preparation which relies on the availability of fresh fish from lakes, which is another way of saying that lakes should be clean in order for fish to be able to live in them. As obvious as this may sound, the truth of the matter is that our lakes and rivers tend to be rather unfit for any form of animal life. And it is sad and shocking to realize the degree with which this fact is either ignored or taken for granted.

The conditions, that is, the ecological “weltanschaung” of any given food, is absolutely crucial to it and should receive a lot of attention. When I visited lake Biwa, Mr. Hiroshi Tanaka showed me the vats and tools he used to make fermented fish, including a long tress of dry rice grass which contains the natural starter for the fermentation and which is placed on top of the rice and fish as a natural “lid”.

I have been wanting to make funazushi ever since. Tanaka sent me detailed instructions. One day, I even got two fermented fish in the post. He had sent them over together with a note for the custom officers, kindly asking them to let the package through. The two specimen of funazushi from lake Biwa have been hibernating in my fridge, waiting for the right season to start up the new process. In the autumn, at the end of the rice harvest, I asked an organic rice farm if I could collect some of their rice hay. I tressed it myself and stored it in the cellar, The fish was the most difficult thing to find. Funa is a small Japanese fish belonging to the family of carps. In Europe, carp farms refuse to sell small specimens and the condition of farming are never ideal. In the end, I found an Italian producer of tench, a small and soft-flavored fish living in ponds and reaching a maximum weight of 700g.

Spring is the right time to start. I drove to Cascina Italian in Carmagnola (Piemonte) and came back with a bag full of thirty or so small tench fish swimming peacefully as I whizzed along the motorway. Gutting was very hard. One should not cut the belly of the fish but extract all entrails from the neck. With specimens measuring only 10cm in length, this is a pretty damn tricky operation. Anyway, they are going to stay under salt and weights for about two months now. The next step consists in washing and drying them for a day, before placing them in a wooden vat with boiled rice.

In two months time, I will repeat the same operation with some larger fish, also from Giacomo Mosso’s farm. Mosso normally sells his tench “in carpione”, cooked and preserved in vinegar. The idea is to see whether the combination of two local products, fish and rice, fermented together, can be appreciated by an Italian public. Or to see if a bridge can be built with the few Japanese families that still make funazushi at home.