Gori Ryori

Gori has been eaten in Kanazawa since at least the Edo period, when the castle town's two clear rivers, the Sai and the Asano, ran thick with the fish and it entered the refined repertoire of Kaga cuisine. The catch was famous for its method: the gori-oshi, a two-person net-push in which one fisher drove the quick, rock-hugging fish out from under stones with a push-board while the other waited with a triangular bamboo scoop, a sight that became a seasonal emblem of the city. By one widely repeated account the Japanese idiom gori-oshi, to force something through by brute persistence, derives from this strenuous fishing technique, though dictionaries note a rival theory tracing it to the mimetic word gorigori and treat the fishing origin as uncertain. The prized fish in Ishikawa is the river sculpin, distinct from the gobies sold as gori elsewhere; the small, clean-tasting catch supplied teahouse banquets and was celebrated in writing by the Kanazawa novelist Muro Saisei.

Tsukudani gori arrive glossy and near-black, each tiny fish soft enough to eat whole, head, bones, and all. The first taste is forthright sweet-salty soy, deepened by mirin into something almost caramel, then comes the concentrated savour of the river fish itself and a faint, clean bitterness from the head. The texture is dense and lightly chewy, sticky with reduced glaze, a few fish at a time with rice or warm sake. Fried as kara-age instead, they shatter crisp with a sweet, faintly muddy freshwater note and no fishiness at all.

Tsukudani is preservation by simmering: the whole fish is cooked slowly in a soy-and-mirin bath until much of its water is driven off and the sugars and salt concentrate. Salt and the high osmotic pressure of the reduced sauce draw moisture from the flesh, while prolonged gentle heat hydrolyses collagen in the fine bones and skin into gelatin, which is why even the bones turn tender enough to eat. Mirin contributes both sweetness and glucose that, with the amino acids of the fish and the soy, drive Maillard browning and a glossy, sticky glaze as the liquid reduces. The river sculpin is naturally rich in free glutamate and the nucleotide inosinate that builds in the flesh after death; cooked with glutamate-bearing soy, the two umami compounds reinforce each other, the synergy that gives so small a fish such depth. For kara-age the live or very fresh fish is dusted in starch and fried hot so the fins splay and the thin body crisps through before the delicate flesh can dry out.