The Deputy Mayor's Mutton

There's a lovely legend, and stories like this one usually start with it. Supposedly tofu was invented by Liu An, ruler of the Huainan region, who lived in the second century BCE — by accident, some say, or while chasing an elixir of immortality. It's a charming story. It's also unproven. Historians treat it politely but carefully: soy curd may well have existed back then — one Han-dynasty funerary relief seems to show something like the process — but people read that carving very differently, and the argument never really ends.

What we do have is a solid date. The year nine hundred sixty-five, China, a book called "Qingyi Lu" — usually translated as "Records of the Clear and the Strange" — written by an official and man of letters named Tao Gu. This is the first reliable written mention of tofu anywhere in the world. And what's telling is how ordinary it is: the author writes about a local official, an assistant to the town's governor, a man named Jishu, who was so poor he couldn't afford mutton. Instead, he bought a few pieces of soy curd at the market every day and ate them with his rice. The neighbours teased him for it — and started calling tofu "the deputy mayor's mutton." The joke got written down, the book survived, and a thousand years later, thanks to nothing more than that joke, we know for certain: by nine hundred sixty-five, tofu was already on sale in the market, cheap, and familiar to everyone.

From there, monasteries enter the story. Buddhist precepts forbid taking life, so for centuries Chinese monastery kitchens did without meat or fish — and soy became their main building block. Toward the end of the twelfth century and into the thirteenth, this style of cooking travelled to Japan, carried by the Zen monks Eisai and Dogen, who had studied in China. Dogen, in fact, wrote an entire manual for monastery cooks in twelve thirty-seven, called the "Tenzo Kyokun." In it, cooking isn't described as a chore — it's a spiritual practice: how to handle rice, how to handle water, how to treat what looks like the smallest, most trivial task.

Out of that came shojin ryori — Japanese temple cuisine, a name that roughly translates as "food of diligent effort." No meat, no fish, but also no onion or garlic: both are considered too stimulating for someone about to sit down and meditate. Within those limits, tofu is used in every form imaginable — fresh, dried, deep-fried, and yuba, the delicate skin lifted off the surface of simmering soy milk, still prized as a local delicacy in Kyoto today.

And here's the part worth pausing on. Inside this strict, disciplined cuisine, there's an entire genre called modoki ryori — dishes of imitation. Food deliberately built to copy the taste and texture of meat or fish. The best-known is ganmodoki: mashed tofu with carrot and burdock root, deep-fried — the name literally means "mock goose." Which raises the question: why would monks want goose at all, even a fake one? The answer is simple, and very human: so the table wouldn't be boring. A restriction doesn't cancel out pleasure — it just sends you looking for it by another route. People understood that a thousand years ago just as well as they do now.

Anything at all — a building, a word, a habit you never questioned. moygid dot online.