By August approaches and my birthday with it. Thirty-three — the yakudoshi year Fumiko warned me about, the unlucky age for women in Japanese tradition. She told me two years ago to be careful. I am being careful. I am being careful the way I am always careful: obsessively, anxiously, with the particular vigilance of a woman who has been watching for danger since she was fourteen and has never found a way to stop.
I made kakigori this week — Japanese shaved ice, the summer dessert that is nothing more than ice shaved to snow-fine crystals and doused in syrup. I used matcha syrup and sweetened condensed milk, piled high in a bowl, eaten fast before it melts. It is childhood in a bowl. It is festival food, summer food, the food of the five minutes between getting the bowl and the ice becoming water. The impermanence is the point. You eat fast. You enjoy fast. You accept that it is already disappearing while you are still tasting it. This is also, I think, the lesson of grief: the thing you love is already disappearing while you are still loving it. The love and the loss happen at the same time. Always.
The tutor sessions continue. We have translated twelve cards now, half the collection. Each card is a window into Fumiko's mind — her priorities, her standards, her quiet opinions about food that she expressed in shorthand and expected the reader to expand. A note on the gyoza card says: "The fold must be tight or the filling escapes. Like a secret." Like a secret. Fumiko was not a poetic woman. She did not use metaphor. She used precision. But this — "like a secret" — is the closest she ever came to poetry, and I have been thinking about it all week. The fold must be tight. The filling must not escape. The gyoza holds its contents the way a person holds grief, the way a family holds history, the way a recipe card holds a woman who is no longer here but whose handwriting says: fold tight. Hold everything in.
I wrote about the recipe cards for the blog — not the translations, not yet, but the act of translating, the experience of reading your grandmother's handwriting after she is gone and finding, in the loops and strokes of her pen, the woman herself. The post was the most personal thing I have written. It got more comments than anything I have published. People want to talk about their grandmothers. People want to talk about the food that was lost when the person who made it was lost. People want the recipe cards. People want the connection. The connection is the thing.
The kakigori I made this week started here — with a simple syrup, the most elemental thing in the dessert kitchen: just sugar and water, dissolved together into something that sweetens without overpowering. I infused mine with matcha for the bowl I described above, but the base is always the same, and there’s something almost meditative about making it. You stand at the stove and stir until the sugar disappears into the water and you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. Fumiko would have approved of a recipe this precise in its simplicity. Make the syrup first. Hold everything else together from there.
Simple Syrup
Prep Time: 2 min | Cook Time: 5 min | Total Time: 7 min | Servings: 16 (about 1 cup)
Ingredients
- 1 cup granulated white sugar
- 1 cup water
Instructions
- Combine. Add the sugar and water to a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir gently to begin dissolving the sugar.
- Heat and dissolve. Continue stirring as the mixture heats. Cook for 3–5 minutes, until the sugar is completely dissolved and the liquid is clear. Do not let it boil vigorously.
- Cool. Remove from heat and allow the syrup to cool to room temperature, about 15–20 minutes.
- Store. Transfer to a clean glass jar or bottle with a tight-fitting lid. Refrigerate for up to 4 weeks. Use over shaved ice, in cocktails, lemonade, iced tea, or anywhere a smooth sweetness is needed.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 48 | Protein: 0g | Fat: 0g | Carbs: 12g | Fiber: 0g | Sodium: 0mg