Eggplant Salad with Sesame and Pondering the Twists of Fate

Before we start: the title is tongue in cheek – it’s Sunday, and pondering the twists of fate should be done only on days that don’t have “day” in them. But sometimes, I do wonder about what life must have been like for my mum when we were small. It’s not always easy to be a western woman in Japan even now – despite the endless fun things to do (karaoke!) and great food (everything! Except shiokara) you chafe at the numerous inequalities, the feelings that there isn’t enough room for the whole of yourself somehow. It’s not something I can explain very well, but any woman raised in a western culture who has lived there is probably nodding in agreement.

For a woman raised in 1950s and 60s New Zealand, used to green open spaces and with a father who always encouraged her to nourish the life of her mind to the point where she attended a boys’ school so she could complete the last year of high school in order that she could go on to study Japanese (Japanese!) at university, 1970s Japan must have been a world apart – it’s certainly a world apart from today’s Japan. She told me once that many places around where she lived in Tokyo as a student lacked proper plumbing and carts still came around every morning to collect the night soil. A middle-aged English student of mine once told me they used to make trips to the beach in Yokohama! That’s like going for a nice getaway on the banks of the London section of the Thames.

I don’t mean to imply that she didn’t want to be there, I think it was an adventure at first, and then she fell in love, but I know myself only too well how circumstance can toss a person into a place where they marvel at exactly how they ended up there whether it’s mostly a positive experience or not.

All I remember of the place we lived in Yokohama is rows upon rows of identical concrete block buildings with numbers on the side and this kind of goldeny brown couch. Actually I can remember quite a lot of scattered images – manually forcing my tired dad’s eyes open of a Sunday morning, the what-seemed-big-at-the-time-but-was-probably-8 square-metres room Mark and I shared and walking to the station with Mark lagging behind and mum calling him a slowcoach.

Even though I’m sure there were difficult things about where we had previously lived in Sapporo where my ojiichan and obaachan were, to have no family support at all, a husband that regularly returned home from work after 10pm and two children under three must have been isolating. Of course this is just me superimposing my feelings onto her; even when I’m surrounded by perfectly lovely people here in Austria, it’s often tiring to have to concentrate so hard to understand the language and read cultural cues that are not my own.

Eventually we did go (back, for her and to, for Mark and I) New Zealand and though sometimes returning can be just as hard to adjust to, I’m eternally grateful I grew up in New Zealand for reasons too numerous to list.

Some years ago, I was digging around in one of mum’s old handwritten cookbooks from when she lived in Japan. There are lots of recipes there and her nasu no nabeshigi inspired me to make this salad, though I used tahini instead of miso. If I had it, I’d use perilla leaf or shiso, the red variety of which is the herb umeboshi are pickled in but I made do with spring onions (negi) and mint and it was delicious nevertheless.

What are your earliest memories?

Eggplant Salad with Sesame Dressing

This probably serves two or three people as a side dish.

Preheat the oven to 160 celsius (320 fahrenheit).
Slice

in half lengthways, then into semi circles about a centimetre (1/2 inch) thick and brush both sides well with a neutral tasting oil. Bake until very soft (about 15-20 minutes).

Combine:

Pour over the eggplant, sprinkle with sesame seeds and ribbons of mint and thinly sliced spring onion. It’s good with some

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Tagged as: aubergine, eggplant, family, mint, own recipe, perilla, shiso, tahini, vegan