Osechi and Me | A New Year's Mood for White Miso Zoni 🎍

When it comes to the star of the New Year, it's osechi. In the world at large, tiered boxes appear, and black beans, herring roe, and kelp rolls line up, occupying the dining table with the look of a New Year's military parade. Back when I lived at my parents' house, my mother also made a proper osechi every year.

Thinking back on it now, that wasn't so much cooking as it was a year-end total war. In the back of my mother standing in the kitchen, there was the aura of a commander leading the Datemaki corps, the simmered dish corps, and the chestnut kinton special forces.

However, as a child, I didn't understand the value of it at all. My only interest during the New Year was New Year's money, and osechi was an adult ritual that didn't suit my palate. In the first place, if osechi were truly delicious enough to want to eat every day, it wouldn't be sealed away only for the New Year. It's like a shrine of taste that opens once a year. I would just finish my visit, and then survive the first three days of the year on mochi and chestnut kinton.

Since I got married, osechi doesn't appear in our home for the New Year. I know how hard it is to make, and I don't have enough faith to go out and buy it. On New Year's Day, I accompany my wife and daughter on their lucky bag expedition, driving the car to the Aeon Mall. There was even a year when our first meal of the year was McDonald's breakfast. Traditional Japanese culture was defeated by a Sausage Egg McMuffin.

Even so, it's not that I don't want any New Year's atmosphere at all. Somewhere in my heart, I find myself wanting to eat white miso zoni. That bowl that appeared on the morning of New Year's at my parents' home in Osaka. I couldn't tell if the round mochi was sinking or floating in the sea of white miso, and I ate it while searching for it with my chopsticks. When the scent of yuzu wafted up, the air in the room felt a little more formal just from that. For me, that bowl was more of a New Year's tradition than the army in the tiered boxes.

Now that my mother has passed away, I cannot recreate that taste exactly. Where was the miso from? What was the dashi? What ingredients were in it? Every time I try to remember, it feels like I'm scraping burnt information off the bottom of a pot of memories. And every year, the New Year ends while I'm still thinking about it.

Someday, I might suddenly decide to buy white miso and try sinking a round mochi into it. If I can think, 'Ah, it was something like this,' then that will be enough.

Although, my favorite way to eat mochi is actually oshiruko.

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