The Boiling Point of Comfort
On the volatile chemistry of sake, mother’s cooking, and the beautiful irony of tolerance
Previously: [A Thousand Years, Still Warm], [What We Train Ourselves Not to Notice]
Having been entrusted with dinner following our lunch, I decided it was time to introduce her to the elusive concept of koku.
Koku is a complex tapestry woven around umami—a sensation that clings to the tongue, breathing a rich, lingering aroma into the senses.
The finest vessel for experiencing this is sake, and I thought I knew just the place in Kyoto where she might experience it.
Twenty seats on the radar
Our destination was Renkonya, an authentic izakaya tucked away in the Kiyamachi district.
With its weathered, seasoned wooden architecture, the tavern holds a mere twenty seats, yet this hidden sanctuary of sake did not escape the radar of the Michelin inspectors. It earned its place as a Bib Gourmand selection back in 2023.
Shameful as it may be to admit, that accolade was the very reason I, a textbook teetotaler, discovered the establishment in the first place.
I cannot drink alcohol, yet I am intimately acquainted with the koku of sake.
The reason for this paradox will follow, but at that moment, the more pressing dilemma was how to alleviate the guilt of occupying a seat in an izakaya without ordering a drink.
To solve this, I summoned my partner who could drink.
And so, with science as our lingua franca, our three-person banquet commenced.
The Reverse Equation
The culinary experience offered here is not about using sake to elevate the food. Rather, it is about using the power of the dishes to make the sake taste as magnificent as humanly possible.
It begins with the simplest of dishes.
First to arrive were the grilled ginkgo nuts and the simmered sardines.
I have a profound weakness for ginkgo nuts. They possess both the unassuming warmth of a legume and the opulent richness of a nut. The ones served here were piping hot, inherently sweet, and utterly sublime.
Furthermore, they arrived with a charming note in English on how to navigate them. “Peel it like a pistachio,” the note advised—a touch of humor that brought an involuntary smile to my face.
Sardines happened to be a favorite of hers, and she beamed, saying, “Oh, this is delicious!” I was reminded of the sheer, formidable depth of Roman gastronomy; they are a people who revel in all kinds of cuts of beef, yet possess the culinary soul to fully embrace that charmer of a sardine.
Then came the scallions.
They were topped with a pat of butter and steam-grilled to perfection.
Under the heat, their sharp, aggressive pungency vanished, replaced by a potent, emerging sweetness. As the fibers collapsed, transforming the texture from a crisp crunch to a melting tenderness, the scallion became a delicacy in its own right.
The difference between my home-cooked version and the tavern’s lay entirely in the salinity.
For someone who doesn’t drink, the salt here was aggressively pronounced, but it was evidently a flawless match for the alcohol. Enveloped in the rich, comforting aroma of butter, the dish prompted her to exclaim with delight, “The aroma...! The aroma is just incredible!”
Next was the shigureni.
It would be no exaggeration to call this a beef caramelization; a thick, decadent coat of teriyaki sauce swathed the meat. Its salty intensity was so concentrated that a single pinch felt capable of anchoring an entire bowl of rice, which meant its compatibility with sake must have been extraordinary. A single sip from her cup confirmed it, securing the dish’s place as her “most deeply moving dish of the night.”
Another creation that earned her highest praise was the zosui.
Rice was simmered in a rich dashi, and into the bubbling pot, an egg was gently introduced. From the velvety, soft-cooked egg and the grains steeped in broth, a gentle, restorative warmth permeated the body.
When it came to the sake, her absolute favorite turned out to be the nigorizake.
In the standard brewing process, the solid remnants of the rice that refuse to dissolve during fermentation are pressed out and discarded as sake lees. Yet, to discard the lees is to forfeit the very koku contained within them.
Having developed a fondness for this intentionally unfiltered nigorizake, the true purpose of tonight’s dinner felt beautifully complete.
The Boiling Point of Comfort
She turned to me and asked, “When did you realize you had no tolerance for alcohol?”
“When I was a child,” I replied.
I decided to tell her the story of kasujiru, a traditional Kyoto comfort food. It is a thick, viscous winter soup forged from sake lees—the kind of dish brewed to warm you to the very marrow of your bones.
If you step into Kyoto during the winter, you will notice how the biting, crystalline air renders the distant mountains vividly sharp. But in the next breath, you are forced to cast your eyes downward as the merciless cold crawls up from the earth, utterly ignoring your shoes to wrap itself around your ankles.
Kasujiru was the ultimate antidote to that piercing cold.
As a child, the moment I saw my first morning breath turn to white vapor, I welcomed it as the long-awaited signal that “the season of kasujiru“ had finally arrived. I would pester my mother relentlessly to make it.
Yet, brewing kasujiru for a family of teetotalers was a rather thrilling experiment.
Sake lees retain a startling amount of residual alcohol. If you simmer the soup for too long, the alcohol vanishes completely, but with it goes the magical aroma—sweet, voluptuous, and silken—that this rice-derived ingredient acquired through the grace of fermentation. Conversely, if you kill the heat too early, the flavor remains spectacular, but the soup mutters a dangerous threat of knocking us unconscious.
When cooking kasujiru, my mother would peer into the steam with the intense concentration of a scientist, meticulously calculating the boiling point of alcohol. She was aiming for that precise, fleeting second where the raw, jagged edge of the alcohol dissipates, while the fragrant soul of the refined sake remains imprisoned within the broth.
Occasionally, her calculations missed the mark.
On those nights, a peculiar silence would settle over the dinner table. One by one, the cheeks of every family member would flush a deepening crimson.
Though I could feel my heart pounding with a violence entirely unsuited to a child’s torso, I never uttered a word of complaint.
Lifting the bowl with both hands, I pressed my lips directly to the lacquer, tilting it to drain the warm broth to its final drop.
Then, peering up at my mother with a faintly glowing face, I would offer a quiet smile and repeat my usual refrain: “It’s beautiful, Mom. Please make it again.”
The Evolutionary Switch
Upon hearing my tale, she shared a story of her own homeland’s wine stews. Because they are simmered for hours, the alcohol evaporates entirely, rendering them perfectly safe for even small children to consume. It had never occurred to me to draw a parallel between kasujiru and a wine stew, yet they are undeniably cut from the same cloth.
However, if one were to subject kasujiru to such prolonged boiling, the delicate, ephemeral nuances of the sake lees would completely take flight. To achieve sublimity, the secret is to keep it below a boil, introducing the heat only briefly. “And so,” I explained to her, “ it is inevitable that a fraction of the alcohol remains. But we eat it anyway, because we crave it.”
There lay the delightful irony.
I could not suppress a wry smile: here was a genetically alcohol-tolerant people meticulously boiling every drop of spirit out of their soup, while we, biologically defenseless against the molecule, willfully pursued a broth that retained it, fully aware of the risk.
Faced with such a contradiction, I like to imagine that our collective lack of tolerance might just be the whimsical intervention of some grander entity—one who, growing anxious over our profound affection for the drink, ingeniously wired a switch into our biology that whispered, “That is quite enough for now.”
I quietly returned to my bowl, letting the lingering warmth of the evening settle in.