Touch by Olaf Olafsson

Author:Olaf Olafsson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Although I haven’t cooked a Japanese breakfast since I lived in London fifty years ago, I feel confident that I would acquit myself well enough if put to the test. Not because I consider myself a particularly talented cook; quite the contrary. But I think I can still rely on my general experience and, even more importantly, on my memory of the time I cooked for Miko, which I expect will be one of the very last things erased from my brain if indeed the doctor’s diagnosis is correct.

The cooking itself isn’t very complicated. The challenge for the chef is precision in timekeeping because all the dishes must be served at the same time. Takahashi-san maintained that attitude was more important than technique, and this applied equally to breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

He used to say that breakfast resembles the first line of a haiku, it shows the way. Lunch is the second line and carries the momentum. The third line, then, is dinner, as it brings everything to a close.

Naturally I intended to practice as much as I could before Miko came to critique my performance, but now I wished I had chosen Thursday instead of Tuesday. I had only two days to get ready, and all of a sudden I felt totally unprepared.

I made no mention of Miko to Takahashi-san when I asked if I could have the keys sooner than intended so that I could start practicing. Not that I meant to deceive him, but he didn’t ask, and so I said nothing.

He took the keys from his desk drawer and handed them to me. “Keep them,” he said. “They may come in handy one day if you arrive for the breakfast shift before me.”

I slept hardly a wink on Saturday night, and on Sunday morning I was in the kitchen by six o’clock. There I worked nonstop until Takahashi-san arrived at nine: boiling the seaweed and dried tuna flakes for the miso soup, pickling the vegetables, steaming the rice, dicing tofu. I cured two salmon fillets in salt and put them in the fridge for the following day, then grilled a fresh piece with a splash of vinegar. As I said, the cookery is comparatively simple, but as anyone who eats Japanese food knows, no two miso soups are the same, and steamed rice can be both good and bad.

Shortly after eight o’clock I had finished preparing the meal. At first I was satisfied with how it turned out, but then a succession of criticisms kept popping into my head—the soup was too bland, the salmon overgrilled, the rice too sticky. The vegetables not pickled enough. The tofu soggy.

By the time Takahashi-san arrived, I had finished clearing everything away. He cast his eye over the kitchen and I could see he was content, as there was no trace of my having worked there, aside from the lingering aromas.

The next morning I repeated the exercise, stopping off at five to buy salmon at our fishmonger’s, arriving an hour later in the kitchen.

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