Tekitou: Autumn #15: Thanksgiving - Boiled, not Baked / 秋＃１５：アメリカの伝統、日本の材料

Thanksgiving! The gloriously secular celebration of eating! However suspicious its originating mythology may be, I have to admit that I can't suppress my enthusiasm for collective gluttony. And what else is Thanksgiving?
アメリカの感謝際！食いしん坊のとてもとても愛された感謝祭！

Last year, it was two ducks in place of a turkey. This year, lacking both turkeys and ovens, I decided that I'd take the opportunity to give thanks for the bounty of the shitamachi -- the "low city" -- in which I reside.
今年伝統的な七面鳥もオーベンもないチェルは下町の豊かさに感謝します！

Tokyo's shitamachi comprises the eastern neighborhoods of Ueno, Asakusa, Yanaka, and Tabata. It is here, according to Donald Richie, that "still retains what little is left of the feel of old Edo -- distinctly plebian, also fun-loving, less inhibited than those remains of areas where the military aristocracy, the shogunate, observed its rules of decorum." The most significant manifestation of this "fun-loving" shitamachi character is the street food. There are breaded and fried glories to be taken in hand, sweet bean paste of every imaginable configuration, and even -- if you are lucky -- the occasional "scotch egg": a hard-boiled egg ensconced in minced meat and fried. All this and more.
下町の魅力はいろいろですが、注目に値するのはその食い物。ミンチコロッケ、まんじゅうの勢ぞろい、たまにスコッチエグでも（揚げたったミンチに囲まれた卵！）。それに感謝します。

So I got a bone from a local butcher shop to start a mellow soup base for our hotpot Thanksgiving party of nine hungry people.

それで、近所の肉屋さんで買った豚の骨を鍋の汁に。

Broken open, of course, so the marrow can seep out.

骨髄が流れるために折った骨。

I blanched the bone, and put it in a pot to simmer with an apple and star anise.

骨をリンゴとスターアニスに煮た。

I let it go for eight hours or so, adding bits of vegetables along the way.

このままで８時間ぐらい。少しずつ野菜もいれた。

For example, I added some daikon -- a kind of radish, the name of which translates literally as "large root."

例えば、大根を。

This particular "big root" was about the size of my arm.

この大根は文字通り大きくて、腕の大きさぐらい。

The daikon is pretty benign as radishes go.

可愛いね。

So once the bones had simmered and simmered and simmered, I added a touch of soy sauce and sugar, and assembled the shitamachi bounty we'd use for our tableside hotpot thanksgiving feast.

骨が煮て煮て、その間下町の恵みを集まった。

Napa cabbage. Of dinosauric proportions.

白菜の爆弾.

Tentacles peeking out from a fishcake casing. This is getting very Jurassic.

ゲソにハロー。

To distract my arriving guests, I had prepared some crudites (And yes: I still like to pronounce them to rhyme with "Luddites." Croooo-deee-teh, la deee da).

お客さんがだんだん来るので少しだけ前菜も準備した。

Chili-miso and yuzukoshô dipping sauces... just to tide us over until...

野菜とチリみそソース、柚子こしょうマヨ。それで我慢できるかな。。。

Everybody in the pot!

ジャーン！

Alongside this hotpot, we also simmered a pot of this chicken broth, to which I had added ginger.

もう一つの鍋にこのチキンスープを使った。

Holy hotpot! Nothing secular about my feelings toward this food. Hotpot as a communal meal does have something of a primal urgency. We were stripped down to our natural state: just a tribe collecting around the fire, literally grunting into our food. Never mind that the fire was fueled by propane, or that our appetites were whetted not through vigorous cooperative hunting, but through the consumption of cans and cans of beer and malt liquor.

無宗教の感謝際だが、鍋に参った。