How Did Sushi Develop? From Fermented Fish to Fast Food and Back
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The original version involved burying fish in fermenting rice for six months to a year, then throwing the rice away and eating the fish. The rice was a preservative rather than an ingredient, the smell was formidable, and the result bears almost no resemblance to anything served today. What is now recognised worldwide as sushi is a nineteenth-century street food from Edo, invented for speed, and it became a global luxury through a combination of refrigeration, aviation and one very successful marketing effort involving tuna.
Preservation first
The technique arrives in Japan from Southeast Asia, probably along the rice-growing regions of the Mekong, some time before the eighth century. Narezushi packed gutted fish in salt and cooked rice and left it to ferment under a weight, during which lactic acid produced by bacteria in the rice preserved the fish and made it safe to store for months. The rice became sour, sticky and unappetising and was discarded. This is the same principle as the fermented fish products still made across Southeast Asia, and a direct descendant survives at Lake Biwa in Japan as funazushi, which is fermented for one to three years, is extremely pungent, and is regarded as a delicacy by people who like it. The point of the whole exercise was that a fishing village could keep a catch through the winter, which mattered enormously and had nothing to do with flavour.
Rice becomes an ingredient
The transformation happens in stages over several centuries and is driven by impatience. From around the fifteenth century, cooks began eating the partly fermented rice along with the fish, cutting the fermentation to a month or so, which produced a dish that was sour and edible rather than merely preserved. The decisive shortcut came with vinegar. Once rice vinegar was cheap and widely available in the Edo period, the sourness that fermentation had supplied could be added directly, which reduced the process from months to minutes. Seasoned rice with fresh fish laid on top requires no waiting at all, and by the early nineteenth century that is what was being sold. The Japanese word for the dish still refers to the sourness rather than to the fish, which is a fossil of the older process.
The street food of Edo
The modern form, nigiri, is conventionally credited to Hanaya Yohei around 1824 in Edo, the city that became Tokyo, and it was fast food in the literal sense. Edo had over a million people, a great many of them single men in lodgings with no cooking facilities, and a dense culture of street stalls. The features of the original are informative:
- •Pieces were two or three times the size of a modern one, since it was a meal rather than a course
- •Fish was cured, marinated in soy, salted or briefly cooked, because refrigeration did not exist and raw fish in a warm city was dangerous
- •It was eaten with the fingers, standing at a stall, in a few minutes
- •The fish came from Tokyo Bay, which is why the style is called Edomae, meaning in front of Edo
- •Fatty tuna, now the most expensive part, was thrown away or used as cat food, because without refrigeration it spoiled fastest and the taste was considered coarse
- •The 1923 earthquake destroyed much of the city and scattered its sushi chefs across Japan, which is how a local Tokyo style became the national one
Refrigeration and the tuna
Two twentieth-century developments produced the modern dish. Refrigeration and then reliable freezing made genuinely raw fish safe and made fatty tuna storable, which turned a discarded cut into the most prized one within a generation. The second was a piece of logistics. Japan Airlines, looking for cargo to fill aircraft returning from North America that flew out full of electronics, began flying Atlantic bluefin tuna from Canada and New England to Tokyo in the early 1970s, where a fish that American fishermen sold for cat food or for a few cents a pound commanded high prices. That trade created a global market for bluefin, drove prices to the point where single fish have sold at auction for over three million dollars, and has been a major factor in the collapse of bluefin stocks, which fell to a small fraction of their historical levels before management measures began a partial recovery.
Going global
Sushi reached the United States through Japanese restaurants in Los Angeles in the 1960s, and its spread required a series of adaptations that Japanese chefs largely regard with tolerance. The California roll, developed in Los Angeles or Vancouver depending on which account you believe, substituted avocado for fatty tuna and turned the roll inside out to hide the seaweed, which diners found off-putting, and it functioned as a gateway for a population that would not eat raw fish. From there the form multiplied into rolls with sauces, deep-frying and ingredients that no Tokyo counter would recognise. The conveyor belt, introduced in Osaka in 1958 by a restaurateur inspired by a brewery bottling line, made the food cheap and casual and is now a global format. At the other end, the apprenticeship tradition for a skilled chef runs for many years and is famously conservative, and the same city now supports both a three-Michelin-star counter with ten seats and a chain selling a plate for a hundred yen.
The takeaway
The original technique buried fish in rice for months so that lactic fermentation would preserve it, and the rice was thrown away. Cooks began eating the partly fermented rice, then replaced fermentation with vinegar, which cut the process to minutes. Nigiri was invented as fast food in Edo around 1824 with cured rather than raw fish, and fatty tuna was discarded as it spoiled too fast. Refrigeration and a 1970s air freight route from North America to Tokyo turned that discarded cut into the most valuable fish in the sea.