Uzumi

Uzumi is documented as a Fukuyama dish reaching back to the Edo period, and the traditional account ties it to the frugality edicts of the age. Under the sumptuary politics of the Fukuyama domain, lavish eating was restricted and the common people were forbidden their finer ingredients, so it is said they took to hiding the luxuries, the shrimp, eel and other treats, at the bottom of the bowl and covering them with plain rice, so that an inspector or a neighbor would see only a humble bowl of rice while the feast lay concealed beneath. The dish is held locally to be some four centuries old, and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries records it among the kyodo-ryori of Hiroshima, explaining the name as a corruption of uzumu, to bury, and the custom as the burying of prized foods under rice to evade the Edo-period bans on extravagance. The same logic of hiding wealth under rice underlies Okayama's barazushi just to the east, born of a comparable domainal edict.

The first spoonfuls are deceptively plain, just clean, fluffy hot rice, and then the spoon breaks into the buried layer and the bowl changes character: sweet plump shrimp, soft slip of conger eel, creamy taro, the deep savor of simmered shiitake and tofu, all slick with a light dashi. The contrast is the whole pleasure, austere white rice above and a warm, brothy, umami-laden stew below. Poured over with hot dashi at the end, it loosens into something between a rice bowl and a soup, the grains carrying the broth and the hidden pieces surfacing one by one, comforting and gentle and warming.

The dish is a study in layered umami and in deliberate contrast. The hidden bed is in effect a small nimono: shrimp, conger eel, taro, shiitake and tofu are simmered in a kombu-and-bonito dashi seasoned with soy, mirin and sake, so glutamate from the kombu meets inosinate from the bonito and the eel and guanylate from the dried shiitake, and the three savory compounds amplify one another far beyond what any single one would give. The taro thickens the broth slightly as its starch gelatinizes, and the porous tofu and eel soak up the seasoned stock. The plain rice on top is placed hot and untouched so that it stays fluffy and neutral, a foil that makes the buried stew taste richer by comparison; when hot dashi is poured over at the end in the ochazuke manner, the heat and liquid loosen the starch on the grain surface, the broth threads down through the rice, and the whole bowl resolves from two separate layers into one warm, integrated mouthful.