How a Bowl Called Sheep's Broth Cast Off Its Meat and Became the Sweet Beside the Tea

Yōkan, in this present age, is a firm, dark-gleaming sweet of bean paste, set out beside the tea.

Cut a blackish bar of it with a small knife, and the face of the cut shows moist and glistening, and the deep sweetness of the azuki, the red bean, clings thick and heavy to the tongue. Nothing in the world keeps such good company with the bitterness of tea. Everyone lifts it to the mouth taking it for a sweet that was born a sweet.

But look closely, if you would, at the name it bears. It is written with two signs — sheep, and kan. And kan means a hot broth of meat and greens simmered together. Which is to say that this sweet, if you trace it all the way back, was once a single bowl of broth in which the flesh of a sheep had been boiled. Not sweet, and no confection. A steaming, honest dish of food.

What I have watched is that sheep's broth casting off its meat, boiling beans down firm, and turning, in time, into a sweet set beside the tea. A bowl that came over from beyond the sea, changing in the kitchen of this country's zen temples into something else altogether — that is the sort of thing I mean.

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It was the winter of 1413 (Ōei 20). I was in service at the kuri, the kitchen quarters, of a certain zen temple in Kyoto, a boy still wearing the unshaved crop of a child, taken on as the lowest sort of kitchen hand.

The kitchen quarters in winter were dark and wide and chilled to the bone. Stand on the earthen floor, and the cold came creeping up through the soles of your feet. Only the front of the cook-hearth was another matter, warmed a little by the crackle of the burning wood and the steam of the boiling water. My work was to feed that hearth its firewood, to draw the water, to rake the ashes, and to run wherever the head of the kitchen sent me. I rose while it was still dark to draw water from the well, my fingers so numbed that I would nearly let the bowls slip. Such were my days.

At that temple there was an aged monk who had studied long in the land of Song, across the sea. His back was bent and the backs of his hands were spotted, but his eyes alone were clear as a child's. The reverend had a fluent tongue for the Chinese speech, and he knew the names of any number of dishes I had never so much as seen, that he had eaten in the temples over there. Tenshin was one of them — a light thing, he said, to fill a small corner of the belly between the hours of discipline. Whenever he spoke the word, the reverend wore the face of a man longing back toward some far country.

One day, in the afternoon, with a cold rain drumming on the roof, that reverend called us kitchen hands together and gave us this charge.

"In the temples over there," he said, "I once ate a thing called yōkan. A hot broth, it was, of boiled sheep's flesh. On a cold winter's day, to sup it down warmed you from the very pit of the belly. Through the rising steam you seemed almost to see the mountains of that far land."

I swallowed hard. The mere words — a broth of meat — set my hungry belly growling. I looked up hard into the reverend's face, lit by the fire of the hearth. But he only shook his head, slowly, from side to side.

"And yet, in this temple, no sheep may be slaughtered. To take no life is our discipline. Flesh we cannot use. Even so — that bowl, its very heart, I should dearly love to copy, somehow or other."

To copy the broth of meat, with no meat at all. To a boy like me it was past all understanding. Only, I remember, there was a strange strain in the reverend's voice.

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From then on the reverend threw himself into it, eager as a child. He hitched up his sleeves, crouched down before the hearth himself, and peered in close at everything the head of the kitchen did.

First the head cook boiled the azuki. The red beans, soaked in water from the evening before, were simmered long and slow. When they had gone soft he crushed them in a mortar, grinding away with the pestle. My arm, on the grip of the pestle, grew heavy soon enough. When the crushed beans were dissolved into broth and ladled into a bowl, a faint steam would rise. But that was no more than a bean soup, and once the steam had cooled it thinned away to nothing at once. It had none of that chew, that resistance, of a sheep's flesh. Ladle as you might, ladle again, it only ran back to the bottom of the bowl.

The reverend folded his arms and groaned over it a while. The fire of the hearth stained his round back red. At last he spoke.

"In place of the flesh, we must add the chew of it. Try working in wheat flour, and the powder of the kuzu vine."

Told to do it, the head cook worked wheat and kuzu into the bean broth. As the powder went in, the broth grew heavy before your eyes, until it dragged at the hand that moved the paddle. This they turned out into a steaming basket, set it over the hearth, and steamed it firm. The steam went billowing up till it clouded the very rafters of the kitchen white. When, after a while, the lid of the basket was lifted off, a warm sweet smell went spreading through the whole kitchen. Cutting the steamed stuff with the small knife, you got a springy, chewy slice of it. Press it with a finger, and it sank a little, then rose back up. Nothing at all like a sheep's flesh, yet it had, sure enough, a chew to it. Not a broth, but a firm mass you could take up with chopsticks.

Stealing my chance while the head cook's eye was elsewhere, I pinched off a scrap with my fingertip and tossed it into my mouth. Still faintly warm. The plain sweetness of the bean, and the smoothness of the kuzu, lay thick and lingering on the tongue. The more I chewed, the more a sweetness welled slowly up from somewhere deep within. Even after it had gone down my throat, the sweetness drew a faint tail behind it. This was no dish of food. Not a thing to fill the belly so much as a thing to please the mouth — something else again. Even a boy like me understood that much. My hand had begun to reach for a second piece when the head cook cleared his throat, and I snatched it hastily back.

At first they added salt, dissolved in miso, and laid chopped greens beside it. All in the spirit of a dish of food, they were trying to draw it near to that sheep's broth from over the sea. Sprinkle on salt, and it did indeed come to seem the sort of thing to eat with rice. But something was wanting. The richness of the meat's own fat, that heavy savor — do what they might, it would not come. The reverend would lift the bowl to his lips and tilt his head, unsatisfied.

And then the reverend, on a sudden whim, let fall a little of the juice of amazura, a syrup drawn from a wild sweet vine. Only the smallest trickle of that thick, sweet liquid — a single amber thread, falling slow from the tip of the spoon.

And then — well. The steamed, firmed piece of bean turned all at once to a deep and rounded taste. The sweetness the azuki had held from the first, and the sweetness of the amazura, laid one over the other, came softly apart upon the tongue. Far better seated than anything salt or miso had made of it. The reverend let fall one spoonful more.

"This is... no longer a broth."

The reverend laughed to himself. He laughed with no voice, only his shoulders shaking. The single piece they had kneaded firm to copy the flesh of a sheep had, somewhere along the way, shrugged off every last trace of that flesh, and turned into a sweet thing to eat.

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Where that sweet piece truly came into its own, at the temple, was at the seat of tea.

By that time it had begun to spread, among the zen temples, to whisk a thick tea for the receiving of guests. You swished the bamboo whisk this way and that, and raised a deep green foam. But to pour a bitter, harsh tea down into an empty belly is no easy thing to bear. A guest unused to it might take a single mouthful and knit his brows. So the reverend set out, beside that tea, the steamed and firmed sweet piece, cut small and square. On a black tray, the dark-gleaming piece and the green tea. Set side by side, they had, of themselves, a strange rightness about them.

The guest takes a mouthful of the tea. His tongue draws tight at the astringency. And upon that, one piece of the sweet. Then the astringency and the sweetness melt together in the mouth, and there comes an aftertaste round and mellow past all telling. Sweetness alone would soon cloy. Astringency alone would tire the tongue. The two of them take the edge off one another, and settle into just the right balance. The guest narrows his eyes and lets out a long breath of contentment.

"This goes rarely well with tea. What manner of food is it?"

The reverend only laughed, and answered that it had once been the broth of a sheep. Surely not, said the guest, tilting his head, and looked once more, long and hard, at the dark-gleaming piece. That this sweet thing, without a scrap of sheep's flesh in it — and half in doubt. A sweet piece with not a shred of sheep's flesh about it, keeping the sheep of far across the sea alive within its name alone — knowing that, the guest was more delighted still.

Kneeling in the corner of the serving, I watched, and a strange feeling came over me. The reverend had, to be sure, set out to copy the broth of a sheep. And what had come of it was a sweet paste that resembled it not in the least. The thing that ought to have been a failed copy pleased people far more than the thing it had copied.

The sheep's flesh that had been lost, no one grieved for any longer. What remained was the name, and the sweetness that keeps company with tea. And yet this one piece led back, straight and true, to a single bowl from beyond the sea. Within the name, one sheep lies quietly hidden.

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It was around this time — as tea spread abroad together with the ways of zen — that the sheep's broth cast off its meat, boiled its beans firm, put on its cloak of amazura, and became the sweet beside the tea. I have watched that change take place in the kitchens of more temples than one.

In time this sweet piece went out beyond the temple walls as well. As sugar came within easier reach, so it is handed down, the sweetness grew deeper still, and a way of setting it firm with kanten, the agar drawn from seaweed, came up too, until it became the dark-gleaming kneaded bar. At the seat of tea there was always that one piece. Bitter tea and sweet yōkan — a pairing set side by side as a matter of course now, but one that sprang, at the first, from a contrivance in a temple kitchen where meat could not be used.

Now, of those who cut a bar of yōkan and think upon the sheep within its name, there are no longer so very many. A sweet is only a sweet, and lifted to the mouth for that.

Even so, I find myself thinking.

When you cut a dark-gleaming piece with a small knife beside the tea, remember its name, if you would, just a little. There was once an aged monk who set out to copy a sheep's broth from beyond the sea, and copied it wrong, and so, all the more, gave people delight. A bowl that cast off its meat gained, for the very measure it had cast away, a sweetness of another kind.

Yōkan only sits there beside the tea. Set a knife to it, and it shows no more than a face of cut, moist and glistening. And yet into that one dark-gleaming piece are soaked the trace of a bowl that crossed the sea, and the patient contrivance of those who, within a discipline that let them use no meat, felt their way to a sweetness. That is the sort of thing I love.

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