Sushi

Although sushi is perhaps the one word most recognized by speakers of English as being Japanese in origin, the name of this dish was not the first word, or even the first food word, borrowed from the Japanese language. The first Japanese word to enter English was bonze, meaning Buddhist priest, which appeared in 1588. After this, the first Japanese food word—mochi, denoting a rice cake—appeared in 1616, the year Shakespeare died. Then sake (a rice wine) appeared in 1687, followed by soy (a sauce) in 1696 and miso (a cooking paste) in 1727. Sake, incidentally, comes from saka mizu, meaning prosperous waters, and soy comes from sho yu, two words meaning salted beans and oil, a name that the Japanese themselves borrowed from Chinese. After these sporadic borrowings, the number of Japanese food words introduced into English dropped off for more than a century and a half. Then, in the late nineteenth century, between 1880 and 1900, the Victorians—who were suddenly crazy about things Japanese—started talking about, if not eating, all kinds of Japanese foods, including sushi (balls of rice garnished with fish), sashimi (raw, sliced fish served with radish or ginger), soba (buckwheat noodles), wasabi (a Japanese herb, somewhat like horseradish), tsukemono (pickled vegetables), tofu (a soya bean curd), and nori (thin layers of seaweed). The origin of some of these names is not known; sushi, however, derives from a phrase meaning it is sour, in reference to the fish being pickled or sometimes even fermented; sashimi derives from two words—sashi, meaning pierce, and mi, meaning flesh—in reference to the fish being thinly sliced; tsukemono also derives from two words, tsukero, meaning to pickle, and mono, meaning a thing, an etymology implying that everything on earth is potentially tsukemono; and tofu derives from dou, meaning beans, and/w, meaning rotten or curdled. In 1920, three more Japanese food words appeared for the first time in English in a Japanese advertising brochure: udon, a wheat flour noodle; sukiyaki, a dish of thinly sliced beef that takes its name from suki, meaning slice, and yaki, meaning broil; and tempura, a dish of battered fish and vegetables whose name the Japanese had taken from Portuguese missionaries in the seventeenth century. The Portuguese in turn had derived their word tempera, meaning seasoning, from the Latin word temperare, meaning to blend; this origin means that tempura is related to words such as temperature and temperance. The most recent infusion of Japanese culinary words into English occurred between 1960 and 1970 and includes rumaki (an appetizer of chicken liver, water chestnuts, and bacon); dashi (cooking stock—its name derives from dashi-jiru, meaning to extract juice); shabu-shabu (thin slices of beef cooked in soup—its name supposedly comes from the sound of beef slices swishing around in the broth); oshibori (a towel used to wash the hands before a meal—the initial o of the word means honorable and shibori means that which has been wrung out); teriyaki (meat marinated in soy sauce, then broiled—the ten part of the word means glaze while yaki means broil); yakitori (chicken broiled on a skewer—the tori part of the word means fowl); and tepan-yaki (a method of broiling food—its name derives from tepan, meaning iron plate).

A traditional Japanese food made of raw fish, usually wrapped in a soft rice shell. Some raw fish contain adults or larvae of the nematodes of the family Anisakidae. In order to prevent these organisms from infecting persons who eat raw fish, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has directed that prior to serving, the fish must be suddenly .frozen to — 31°F (-34.4°C) or below for 15 hr, or held in a commercial freezer at -4°F (-20°C) for 24 hr. After that period, the fish may be thawed and served.