Film Researcher Miura Tetsuya’s Approach to Cooking for Yourself, Where the Excitement Outweighs the Hassles

Miura Tetsuya specializes in film studies and has authored such titles as History of the Suspense Film and What Is Cinema? A History of French Film. He has also been interested in food and has loved eating since he was a child. We talked with Miura, who states that film and food share many commonalities, about film, food, and cooking for yourself.

Both film and food open a window to worlds beyond your daily life

“Film is a means to learn and experience vicariously other worlds that exist beyond our everyday lives, through the frame of the screen. The enjoyment of food, I feel, shares many things in common with film,” says Miura Tetsuya.
From a young age, he had a powerful desire to eat many things, and he was nagged by dreams of food he had never tasted and wanting someday to travel to Tokyo or other countries to eat different foods.

“But even after moving to Tokyo, while I was young and seeking to become a researcher, I couldn’t visit the nice restaurants I had yearned for. Instead, I read recipe books and essays on cooking and got into creating dishes I had never eaten before. Even though I had a lot of freedom in a way, my life back then was limited. I had no money, I couldn’t travel, and it didn’t seem like I’d get the job I wanted anytime soon. That’s why I felt like watching movies rescued me and cooking was more than a way to relax; it allowed me to feel enjoyment and happiness. Both film and cooking for myself opened a window for me to worlds beyond my everyday life.”

Miura’s first book related to food was Books That Make You Want to Eat, a critique of contemporary cookbooks and cooking essays. The question of what is food was a major theme for him, a Fukushima native, that he contemplated through the lens of the Great East Japan Earthquake.

“One of the subjects of my film studies is suspense. Suspense is about crafting some event that turns normal life into some other form or that shakes your foundations and beliefs. Another aspect of suspense is that it makes us aware of everyday things that we hadn’t been conscious of before. The earthquake and nuclear plant disaster were events that got me to reappraise my ordinary meals. They made me keenly aware that I really didn’t know anything about the things I’d had been eating every day.
“At the time, I was screening documentaries in Fukushima and holding events for discussions with local residents. At one of these events, I met a rice farmer and I was able to hear at great length the hardships he confronted while attempting to resume growing rice again after the earthquake. This series of incidents provided me with the chance to rethink food and motivated me to write Books That Make You Want to Eat.”

How anyone can become a willing and cheerful home cook

Miura’s latest book — Twenty-Six Weeks to Becoming a Home Cook — is framed around the idea that if you complete the tasks in one chapter a week, after 26 weeks — or half a year — anyone can become a home cook who willingly cooks for themselves.
It may sound like a recipe book, but in fact it’s much more than that. Miura conveys his ideas on how to approach and enjoy cooking for yourself, sometimes in a concrete way, sometimes in a literary tone, and sometimes by way of a scientific or philosophical perspective.

Among these, Miura talks about one of the more important elements of continuing to cook for oneself, which is to be captivated by the flavors (mainly the smells) and to actively savor the thrill of being captivated.

“In my view, we sense deliciousness through two main pathways. One pathway are the tastes you sense with your tongue — tastes that are comfortable and familiar. I call this pathway the C sense for ‘comfortable’ sensations. They call this comfort food in the States, but I feel it’s easier to imagine these as ready-made tastes designed to please the masses. The other pathway involves sensations you generally pick up with your nose. These are aromas that arrive from outside your everyday world and that bring new discoveries and elicit tingling sensations. This pathway I call the F sense for sensations as ‘flavors’. These are the flavors that you perceive with your nose as an organ that let you enjoy seasonal changes and the idiosyncrasies and variations in ingredients like vegetables and fish. If you get a cold, you may no longer be able to distinguish differences in the tastes of food. This is because your nose is blocked and you can’t sense flavors.
“Normally, these two types of sensations are mixed together. But in reality, they are sensed separately by the nose and the tongue, so that’s why I decided to treat them as two different pathways.”

Tastes don’t need to be perfectly balanced, or do you judge your cooking with a demerit system?

An exchange between Miura’s father and mother led to his conception of the C sense and the F sense.

“My dad once commented that the oden stew he bought at a convenience store tasted better than the oden my mom made. To be fair, my mom’s oden did lack the in-your-face umami flavor that convenience store oden has. But she made the broth from scratch and the oden’s flavor was derived from the vegetables themselves. When I think about it now, it’s clear that what my dad meant by delicious and what my mom meant by delicious were two different things. In order to untangle this sort of confusion, I tried to put the two into words — C sense and F sense.”

The familiar, consistent taste of oden from convenience stores aimed for the masses stimulates the C sense, whereas the taste of oden made at home, in which the flavors vary depending on the ingredients, stimulates the F sense.

“By no means, do I intend to deny the convenience of products with comforting tastes that satisfy the C sense. But when you are making something for yourself as my mom did, you should be prioritizing the F sense. And that was one of my points in the book. Homemade oden has the taste of that home. It comes about by my mom gathering the flavors she likes, giving her stew a one-of-a-kind taste that can’t be replicated. Because she doesn’t add too much umami flavor, the flavors of the daikon radish and other vegetables harvested from neighboring fields remain distinct. I hope people can enjoy their F senses like this.”

Recently, what’s trending are cookbooks that focus on the C sense and that extol how easy it is to get the right kind of flavor. Miura, however, believes that it’s important for home cooks to occasionally enjoy their F senses, rather than being completely devoted to the C sense.

“I think that some people who lack confidence in their cooking abilities assume that there must be the perfect, 100-point taste out there, and then get stuck in a mindset where they see their own cooking as scoring only 90 or 75 points, using some kind of demerit system. They worry whether the taste is right or whether it is perfectly balanced. But when you’re cooking for yourself, in my opinion, it’s okay if the taste isn’t right or exactly the way you want it. Whatever ingredients you can get your hands on today, whether burdock root or sardines, they will have their own distinctive flavors. And if your focus is to simply enjoy their flavors, anything you do will score more points. It’s okay to keep the cooking and processing to a minimum and enjoy the good aroma that only burdock root has. Or the aroma of sardines. Appreciate the variations in taste as characteristics in themselves. I want to enjoy, actively and with my F sense, the way today’s dish turned out, whatever it is. You don’t have to do this every day, of course, but I like to cherish my F sense as a way to not let my C sense determine everything.”

“Prepare three cooking trays for deep-fried foods” — an approach that makes cooking for yourself fun and exciting

Despite Miura’s encouragements, there are likely people who still think cooking for themselves is time-consuming. For these people, Miura explains from various angles approaches where the excitement surpasses the hassles.

“For example, to enjoy deep-frying, I make it simple, such as ‘first, prepare three cooking trays. This is one trick to smoothly prepare deep-fried food, which many people think of as troublesome.”

Miura also says that there are various ways to make cooking at home more enjoyable and less of an annoyance, such as finding a reliable greengrocer or fishmonger to act as your teacher, using tableware that makes food look more appetizing, and dividing up household chores as fairly as possible.

“People tend to unconsciously avoid things that are troublesome. Understanding this, the secret to continuing to cook for yourself is designing out the friction points, or, in other words, forming good habits. This book is kind of a mediator that finds ways to greatly reduce the proportion of aggravation so that cooking for yourself doesn’t feel like a burden.”

Miso is a place to come home to, and fermented foods are the foundations of taste sensations

The book includes descriptions of fermented foods. How does Miura feel about fermented foods?

“For me, miso feels like a place I come home to, and I think of fermented foods as the foundations of taste sensations.”

From a young age, Japanese people are familiarized with the tastes of dashi stock, soy sauce, and miso. Miura thinks taking in and savoring these aromas is the default setting for people born and raised in Japan.

“If you don’t have a base from which you can enjoy dashi or soy sauce, then it’s hard to enjoy Japanese food. Fermented foods are things that come across as natural to Japanese people, but for people from other countries who aren’t familiar with fermented foods, they may find the flavors overpowering or the smells too pungent at first. But as they get used to these foods, they gradually come to appreciate their robust aromas.”

Fermented foods also sometimes act like noise cancellation.
“Foods with strong earthy smells like burdock root or sashimi may seem bewildering to people who are not used to them. I think some people from other countries would be startled if these foods were suddenly thrust under their nose. When strong-flavored ingredients like these are combined with fermented foods like soy sauce, miso, vinegar, and saké, the most prominent flavors cancel each other out. In other words, the noise is canceled out and only the pleasing flavors stand out clearly. I think one of the roles and attractions of fermented foods is to make natural tasting foods more palatable without overprocessing them.”

Like working out or studying a language, the more you cook for yourself, the better you get at it

For Miura, who grew up in a household that made their own fermented foods, the smell of fermentation is a nostalgic and happy smell. And he believes that even people who don’t feel this way, if they make their own fermented foods, at some point will begin to enjoy fermented foods and feel comfortable with them.

“My daughter, in fact, initially said she hated amazake [a sweet drink made from fermented koji rice malt] because it stinks. That came as a shock to me. But when you think about it, her reaction was absolutely natural. She had never experienced it before. Because of that, I decided to try making amazake at home. By making it at home, you can see the process which gives a sense of reassurance, and together these make it feel even more delicious.
“I also make my own kabura-zushi [salted yellowtail or mackerel and turnips pickled in koji], which is pickled using lactic acid fermentation and koji mold. It all started when I first tried kabura-zushi in Toyama and was impressed by it. I think people sometimes feel some uneasiness at first about fermented foods from a place they don’t know. And a part of it is sensing some resistance to the tastes local to another area, like when you enter another person’s private space. Conversely, getting to know a taste you’ve never encountered before and overcoming the hurdles is a wonderful joy and a thrilling experience.”

Many people likely regard making homemade kabura-zushi as a difficult undertaking. But Miura feels it’s more possible than ever in our modern world.

“In the past, kabura-zushi was a local delicacy that could be made only in places like Toyama or Ishikawa with cold, snowy winters that prevent the growth of unwanted bacteria and where fatty Himi yellowtail are caught. But these days, you can easily buy Himi yellowtail even from outside those prefectures, and even an amateur can make kabura-zushi without fail by using vacuum packs or equipment to maintain the fermentation temperature.”

Miura, with a smile, says that our modern conveniences are our fermentation allies. He says if you give fermentation a try without worrying how difficult it might be or how high the hurdles are, you’ll find it surprisingly easy.

Our final question to Miura was who would he like to read this book.

“I’d like people about to start living on their own to read it as a primer. But I’d also like people to read it who can already cook but don’t really enjoy cooking or who want to enjoy it more. There’s the saying that such-and-such will not let you down. For example, with studying a language or working out, if you can progress at your own pace, the more you do, the more you get back, and you achieve a sense of well-being and happiness. Cooking for yourself is exactly this. Even if you don’t have any money, you can still make your own delicious meals. Even if you don’t get a job you like or you are slow in finding success in life, I think it’s fine as long as you can cook for yourself and be happy. In my 20s, cooking for myself was a form of emotional support. When I was dating my current wife, we couldn’t go out to restaurants like other people our age with more financial means. But we could make delicious meals at home and that helped us maintain our peace of mind. Restaurants, of course, have their own charm. But cooking for yourself has its own wonderful joy. I would be thrilled if people build up their skills one chapter at a time, and overcome one challenge at a time, to become home cooks.”