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Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. Emiko Davies is from Australia and lives in Florence, Italy, but her new cookbook explores the traditions of her ancestors who were Japanese. The book is called Gohan: Everyday Japanese Cooking: Memories and Stories from my Family’s Kitchen. It shares stories and recipes from her childhood at her grandparents' Buddhist temple outside Tokyo. Much of her career and food is focused on Italian cuisine, and so this book Gohan, which is Japanese for cooked rice, represents a kind of return to her roots.

The book also explores the history of Japan's food culture. For example, did you know that ovens were simply not a thing in Japan until recently, and that beef dishes are rare because an emperor during the Meiji period banned meat for a time? See, you'll learn stuff too. Emiko Davies joins me now to talk about Gohan: Everyday Japanese Cooking: Memories and Stories from my Family’s Kitchen. Emiko, nice to meet you.

Emiko Davies: Nice to meet you. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: Tell us a little bit about your family, since 'family's kitchen' is in the title.

Emiko Davies: Well, my mother is Japanese, my father's Australian. I was born in Australia, but I grew up in Australia, in China, I went to school in the States, I now live in Italy. I've been living in Italy for nearly 20 years, so I'm kind of all over the place.

Alison Stewart: What led you to write the book?

Emiko Davies: This is my sixth cookbook, and my previous books have all been about Italian food. My third book, I delved right into my -- a book about my husband's -- he's Italian, his Italian family, so I was writing about the places where his ancestors are from, Southern Italy, Northern Italy, Tuscany, which is where we live now. After writing that book, I got a lot of feedback from people saying, "I'd really love for you to write about your own family," and I thought, "Actually, yes, I'd really like to do that as well." That was kind of the inspiration behind this, was -- I guess I was writing more books that were becoming sort of more personal family stories, personal stories of family food with my current life in Italy, and I thought, Japanese food is actually -- that is my soul food.

I mean, I eat pasta every day, but honestly, you could take it away from me today, just give me rice. I need rice every day, and I'll be happy. Japanese food really is the food that I'm most nostalgic for, that comforts me more than anything else, and writing this book really made me realize that.

Alison Stewart: Let's start with a dish that you write, "Sends me back to my childhood." There's rice, there's egg, and there's soy sauce. What's it called, and what is the secret to bringing these three flavors to create what you call pure comfort food?

Emiko Davies: That's a dish that we call tamagonogohan, which just means egg and rice. My five-year-old, this is her favorite dish as well, and she can't say tamagonogohan yet. She can't pronounce it properly, so she just called it eggy rice, which basically explains it all. You just basically put a little dash of soy sauce into an egg, crack an egg, and you beat that together. Then put a little bit of oil in a pan and pour the egg as if you're going to do scrambled eggs. But while the egg is still really soft, like not yet cooked, you pour in a bowl of hot -- or actually, you can do it with cold also -- cooked rice, and then you stir fry it all together.

It literally takes two minutes to make, and because the egg is still uncooked when you put the rice on it and then it finishes cooking in the pan, the rice becomes really lovely and soft, and it's just -- I don't know. For me, the combination of egg and rice is super, super comforting. It's nourishing, it makes me feel really happy when I eat it. It's the thing I make my kids when we're all tired and everyone's hungry and there's nothing in the fridge, we'll make this. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: My guest is Emiko Davies, the name of the cookbook is Gohan: Everyday Japanese Cooking: Memories and Stories from my Family’s Kitchen. Your recipe for New Year's soba, this comes together quickly as well. Why is this associated with the New Year's celebration?

Emiko Davies: Oh, I love this. Soba is made with buckwheat, and there's a lot of symbolism behind buckwheat. One of the things is that it's a grain that grows in places where other things don't, so it's considered really resilient as a plant. Therefore, when you eat buckwheat, it's like a symbol of resilience, which is a nice thing to start the new year with. There's also the idea that buckwheat noodles are really easy to cut with your teeth. As you're slipping the noodles, when they're too long, you break them off with your teeth, and they're really easy to cut. So, there's this idea that eating noodles, buckwheat noodles, is like letting go of the past easily.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Emiko Davies: Yes. Then the other symbolism which I love is that the noodles are long, and so eating soba noodles for New Year's is a symbol of long life. I think those are all three things I can really get behind on New Year's, so this is a really nice tradition.

Alison Stewart: Yes. As I mentioned, you share some part of Japanese history, Japanese culinary history. Let's talk about the ovens. A note on ovens, she says that basically, in Japanese cooking, one hardly ever uses an oven. Why is this the case?

Emiko Davies: A lot of Japanese kitchens were traditionally -- well, the very old ones were literally like a pit in the middle of the room. You were cooking over fire, and so all of the cooking that evolved was something that you could easily cook over fire, and that translated into cooking over a stovetop. Whereas you didn't really have something like in Italy, where you would have like a wood-fired oven, or something that's more enclosed, where you would be baking inside of something.

In modern-day Japan, the kitchens are really small. There's just no space for ovens, and so even now, it's rare to find an oven in a small Tokyo apartment, or at least you wouldn't find a full-sized one. You might have like a toaster oven or something like that, and a lot of traditional Japanese dishes just simply don't call for an oven. I think I have just a couple of recipes in here that call for being baked, or something that's being baked. It's really quite a new thing.

Alison Stewart: Well, that's what you don't need to cook a Japanese meal. What's a utensil that you think people really should get if they want to tackle cooking real homestyle Japanese food?

Emiko Davies: I think that you can use really anything to cook everyday Japanese food. It's really very simple cooking, very easy cooking. One of the things I can't live without though are long Japanese chopsticks. These are designed for cooking with, so they're very, very long, so you don't have your hand too close to the fire or the heat source. I actually use them for cooking anything that I'm cooking. I use them almost every day, whether I'm cooking Italian food or Japanese food. Something really close to it would be like tongs, I suppose, but the chopsticks are great because they're so fine, so you can be really precise with them.

Alison Stewart: How do you feel, rice cooker, no rice cooker?

Emiko Davies: Because I live in Italy, and we also have very small kitchens here, I don't have space for a rice cooker. When I was in college, I didn't have space or money to buy gadgets, so since leaving home, I've always cooked rice in just a saucepan on the stovetop. You just need a good lid, and make sure it's tight-fitting, and you can still make really good Japanese rice in a saucepan. But a rice cooker is something my mom doesn't live without. She's always had a rice cooker.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Emiko Davies, the name of the book is Gohan: Everyday Japanese Cooking: Memories and Stories from my Family’s Kitchen. I do want to get to a recipe which you were kind enough to let us put on our site, Welcome Home Sukiyaki. Tell us how you prepare this dish and why you prefer the Tokyo-style preparation rather than the Osaka-style.

Emiko Davies: Well, for me, this is a really special dish. It's the dish that my mom usually makes for me when I come home, that's why I wanted to call it Welcome Home Sukiyaki. It's a great dish because you basically cook around the table, so when I would come home -- I've been living overseas since I was like 17. This way, my mom gets to sit at the table as well, and we can talk and catch up, and she's not standing up in the kitchen while the rest of us are at the table. You cook everything at the table.

What it starts with, the counter style or the Tokyo style is you make this really rich, delicious, sweet soy sauce with mirin and sake and soy sauce, and you pour that into a hot pot that goes in the middle of the table. Then you can just prepare this platter of all the things that you're going to cook in this sauce. Honestly, it can be really any kind of vegetable. We really love things like mushrooms and cabbage. Personally, my favorite bit is the Tofu because it just sucks up this delicious sauce so well. There's usually some really thinly sliced marbled beef -- What else? We put in some noodles, any sort of greens like scallions are really nice, even leek, that kind of thing. You sit around the table, everyone has a bowl of rice, and you put all of the food in bit by bit. As it cooks, you take it out and -- It's a really social meal and something that you're all doing together, and I really, really love that as a family meal.

Alison Stewart: You write about a Japanese word that's used the way people might use bon appétit. Its direct translation is a bit more meaningful to you than good eating. I'm going to ask you to say the word and what it means to you.

Emiko Davies: The word is itadakimasu, and I used to read -- People would translate it as bon appétit, and it really is so much more than that because the word itadakimasu comes from 'to receive' or 'to accept.' It's like saying, "I humbly receive this food," but really what it is, is it's giving thanks to the food. It goes back to a very ancient form of a Buddhist concept where you're not only thanking the person who cooked you dinner, but you're thanking the person who got all the groceries for you, or who grew all the food for you, or the people who harvested the food, who hunted the food. You're even thanking the plants and the animals for being your food. It's just like a symbol of respect for all of the living things that created that meal for you. You say it every time you sit down to a meal, even if you're just sitting alone and you cooked your meal yourself. I think it's a really beautiful concept.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to ask you to say it one more time.

Emiko Davies: Itadakimasu.

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Emiko Davies, the name of the book is Gohan: Everyday Japanese Cooking: Memories and Stories from my Family’s Kitchen. Emiko, thank you so much for sharing your family's recipes and stories with us.

Emiko Davies: Thank you for having me. This was really fun.

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