Thick and White: The Bowl That Fed a Starving Hamlet

Udon is a noodle: wheat flour kneaded with water, rolled and beaten out, and cut into a single thick strand.

To begin with, it was nothing to speak of — only a lump of flour. You grind wheat on a hand-quern, sift it, and it turns to a white flour. Knead that with water and you get a dough with no hold to it, sticky and clinging to the hands. Drop it into warmed water and it comes apart into something like a thin gruel. Wheat was an awkward grain: unlike rice, it would not come good boiled up in the grain as it was. That was the very reason people took the trouble to grind it to flour.

But take that flour, knead it, let it rest, roll it out thin, and cut it fine. That alone, and the dough turns into a noodle with a firm backbone to it. It does not come apart in the boiling water; pull it up with chopsticks and it slides smooth down the throat. When the two crafts came together — the grinding, and the rolling-and-cutting — the flour that had had no hold to it took, for the first time, the shape of a food.

What I have watched is the way that white flour, led on by the crafts of grinding and of beating that had crossed over from beyond the sea, took root as an everyday food that filled the bellies of the hamlet folk day upon day. How a single warm bowl of noodles came to sit down in the very middle of daily life — that is the sort of thing I mean.

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It was the winter of 1462 (Kanshō 3). I was living in a hamlet in Ōmi, doing odd labor at the gate of a small temple.

That year came after a dreadful famine. In the capital, more than could be counted had starved and fallen; and in the hamlet too the fields had yielded thinly, and the rice had long since run out. From about the autumn reaping the rains had settled in and stayed, and the rice-ears hung down and blackened, and when you rubbed the tips with a nail only empty husks spilled out. When winter came, along the village road lay men gone to skin and bone and stopped moving, with straw mats laid over them. At the temple gate too there was no end to the shapes of those who only stood there, bowls clutched in trembling hands.

Even so, the wheat alone would put out ears, at the very edge of a starved field. People boiled it or parched it and made shift to fill their bellies with it, but boiled wheat was hard and dry, and chew as you might it would not break down in the mouth, and went hard down the throat. The old, their teeth gone weak, heaved at the shoulder just to swallow a single grain of it.

At that temple there was an aged monk who was said to have studied the usages of the land of Tang. In his youth he had picked up, from a merchant who had crossed the sea, the craft of kneading flour and rolling and cutting it. Over there, he said, they did not boil wheat in the grain; one and all they ground it to flour, kneaded and beat it, and ate it from hot water. Wheat, eaten as flour beaten out, went down far easier than in the grain, and stayed longer in the belly. The monks of the temples over there too, in place of taking meat, would often eat those white noodles — so the monk told it, in a dry voice.

"In the temples over there, whenever folk gather they set a great cauldron of water to boil, beat out the white noodles, and serve them to the guests. The sound of the water shaken off in the steam — why, it is like rain."

At first the hamlet folk listened to the tale as half a made-up thing. Wheat, in this country, they did no more with than parch it hard to chew, or boil it into a gruel to pour down; what good the grinding of it to flour might do, most of them had no notion. Flour was thought a feeble thing — spill it and the wind takes it, drop it in water and it dissolves and is gone.

By the monk's direction, a hand-quern was set up in the temple garden. Two round stones laid one upon the other; turn the upper stone round and round, and the wheat grains dropped between them were crushed, and white flour spilled from the rim. The low grinding of stone on stone — gori, gori — rang on and on in the cold of the morning garden. And the one who turned that quern from morning to night was one of the village old women, Oshino by name.

I would break off from splitting kindling and go, again and again, to watch that quern. Oshino, her back bent, clung with her wrinkled hands to the heavy turning-bar and drove the stone round, grinding, grinding. Her breath came white, and on her sparse white hair the white of the flour lay lightly, so that she seemed frosted over. Sweat stood on her brow, her shoulders heaved for breath, and still she would not stay her hands. About the quern hung the faint, sweet, green smell of new-ground flour.

"Grandmother, you needn't work yourself so. Boil it in the grain, and there'd be none of this trouble."

When I said it, Oshino, without staying her grinding hands, answered in a cracked voice.

"In the grain it will not go down — not for the old, nor for the little ones. But beaten and rolled out, this flour goes down easy, into a toothless mouth, into a belly weak from sickness. The trouble of the grinding is for the sake of that."

As she spoke, Oshino scooped a little of the flour from the rim of the quern with her fingertip and let it fall into my palm. It was dry and fine and cold, like face-powder.

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The flour she had ground and saved, Oshino tipped into a wooden bowl, and, adding little by little a water in which salt had been dissolved, began to knead.

The flour, that had crumbled apart at first, gathered as she kneaded into a single mass. She pushed back what welled up between her fingers, bore down with her whole body into the bottom of the bowl, pressed and turned it back, folded and pressed again. Before long the dough took on a sheen, gathered moist and whole, and clung to Oshino's palm. This she wrapped in a cloth and let rest a while in a warm place by the hearth. "Let it rest so," said Oshino, "and the dough settles, and comes up with a backbone to it," and she stroked the cloth as one soothes a child.

The rested dough she rolled out next upon a board with a rolling-pin, pressing hard. Thin, and flat, and patiently. Rolling and folding, and rolling out again. Under the pin the dough gave a low sound — michi, michi. Where in those thin arms of hers such strength was left, I could only stare. The rolled dough thinned until it was faintly translucent, until the grain of the board showed through it.

When it was rolled thin enough, Oshino dusted it with flour, folded it, and with a well-whetted knife cut it fine from the end. Ton, ton, the cutting board sounded, and one white ribbon after another was struck free. Let the hand slip even a little, she said, and the widths would not come even, and the boiling would go uneven. Oshino's knife, from long years of the work, cut them to a width without a hair's difference. With each cut she shifted the knife a little to work in the dusting-flour, and lightly loosened and spread the strands so they would not cling to one another. A heap of thick white noodles, their cut ends all of a width, mounted up on the board before my eyes.

I was caught by the movement of her hands. The hard wheat grain, ground, kneaded, rolled, and now, so, changing strand by strand into white noodles. What could not go down the throat in the grain, passing through hand after hand of a person, shifted into something like a wholly different food. The way of that shifting was a wonder to me.

These she cast — para — into the great cauldron boiling hard.

As the white ribbons scattered into the water, with a hiss the face of the water sank once, and then boiled up again, huge. The noodles, sunk at first to the bottom, after a while rose floating up, softly. They took on a sheen, near to translucent, and swam, swaying, in the water. The warm steam off the boiling noodles, mingled with the smell of wheat, rose up in clouds even into the cold garden. Oshino, standing within that steam, showed white and blurred. She lifted the noodles at the boil into a zaru — a woven bamboo colander — shook off the water, and sank them into a hot broth of dissolved miso; and each time she filled a bowl a white steam rose up, soft. These were carried out to the temple gate.

That winter, the folk of the hamlet, starved and gone thin, came gathering with bowls in their arms. Children, the old, those weak from sickness. They took the bowls in their numbed hands, and at one sip of the steaming bowl the faces that had been drawn hard loosened, of a sudden, open.

"Ah — it is warm. This — this goes down."

A toothless old man, pulling up the noodles with a slither, said it with his eyes gone wet. A small child who had only hung his head before the hard boiled wheat now buried his face in the bowl and, his cheeks reddened with the steam, fell to eating with his whole heart. The sound of broth being sipped, and breath drawn like weeping, overlapped here and there before the gate. Oshino watched it all, steadily, from beside the cauldron. The sweat she had shed clinging to the turning-bar was warming, now, the bellies of these people. On her face, within the weariness, lay a color strangely at peace.

It came home to me then. That Oshino had turned the quern from morning to night was not only to make flour. It was to give out, to every one of the hamlet folk, a gentle bowl that would go down a toothless mouth and a weakened belly. The trouble of the grinding, the trouble of the beating, were a way round — a roundabout way to save the very weakest from starving.

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That white noodle, from then on, sent its roots down little by little into the hamlets of Ōmi.

Houses that set up a hand-quern grew more; and the handling of it — grinding wheat to flour, kneading and rolling and cutting — passed from mother to daughter, from mother-in-law to bride. In time it was no longer a food of the temple gate alone. On days of celebration, on days when folk gathered, and on plain ordinary days too, it came to sit down in the middle of daily life, as a bowl steaming up from the cauldron. The crafts of grinding and of beating, carried over from the mainland, crossing the sea and crossing the years, turned into the thing that filled this hamlet's bellies day upon day.

Nowadays that thick white noodle has become an everyday food, to be found in any hamlet. Buy a dried bundle of it at a shop, boil the water and cast it in, and a bowl is ready in no time. Those who turn a hand-quern, those who roll out dough with a pin — you scarcely see them anymore.

And even so, I think —

On a winter's evening, slurping up a single steaming bowl of white noodles, I would have you spare just a little thought for how much trouble that one strand passed through to come here. The wheat of a starved field, ground, kneaded, rested, rolled, and cut. There is the sweat an old woman with a bent back shed, clinging to the turning-bar. There is the trouble of the roundabout way, wished by one who longed to warm the bellies of a starving hamlet.

Udon is only steaming there in the bowl. Pull it up with your chopsticks and it does no more than slide smooth down the throat. And yet into that one strand are twisted, white, the crafts that crossed the sea, and the hands of the people who longed to feed the weak something warm. Such things — those are what I love.

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