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Roll with it baby
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Sunlight streams through the single window above me. I look up at my mother. Her smile warms me. My hands press the nori, dried seaweed, firmly into place. She takes the maki, roll, from my hands and places it on the cutting board. She reminds me we have to wait for the rice to set before we cut the sushi. I can’t wait to eat it. It’s my first time making sushi and I’m very happy to spend time with her.
I grew up in a family of four girls. Both of my parents worked and my younger sister and I would be, by today’s standards, “latchkey kids.” My mother has strong values as far as cleanliness and housekeeping are concerned. All chores were to be done before my mother came home from work at 5:30. Also, the rice for dinner had to be washed and cooking by 5:15. Now that I am older, I understand the myriad of reasons my mother had for these strict and unbendable rules.
My mother, who is part Hawaiian, grew up in a family of seventeen children. She was born in the older half of the group and had the responsibility of helping to raise her much younger siblings. Unfortunately both of her parents were alcoholics, so a lot of the adult duties fell to her and her siblings.
Most Americans don’t really understand that at the time of my parents’ youth Hawaii was still a territory. We had just barely started to leave the agricultural way of life that we had maintained for almost a thousand years. My grandfather was a fisherman and my grandmother raised the kids. Any child old enough was put to work. Most kids worked on the coffee farm, or did housework. Sometimes they were sent on the family boat for a stint of fishing.
My mother’s sometimes harsh upbringing allowed her to be a very strong and determined woman, which allowed me to be raised a very strong and determined woman myself. The difference between our strengths is that she values the stability of the known, and I, on the other hand, embrace difference and change.
This is definitely shown in our differing styles of sushi making. Now sushi making in Hawaii is not like sushi making in Japan. With the intermixing of cultures, Japanese cuisine, along with all the others, were altered to suit the taste of the local peoples. So, the sushi of Japan is not necessarily the same sushi in Hawaii. I grew up thinking of sushi as maki sushi, or roll sushi, which usually had as a filling tuna, gourd, cucumber, carrots, and colored bonito flakes.
On the weekends, my mother would try new recipes. One of the more interesting was her attempt at California rolls. The recipe had just come to Hawaii, in the mid to late `80’s, from California. The ingredients included, besides the prerequisite sushi rice and nori, avocado, crabmeat, mayonnaise, and cucumber. These were rolled, like a sleeping bag, within the sushi rice, and the nori on the outside of it all.
The first thing you do when making sushi is to cook the rice. There are usually two options for this, the old fashion way, a pot on the stove, or the more commonly used electric rice cooker. The rice must be white medium grain and preferably Japanese. Next, the rice is usually placed in a bamboo bowl to cool. I then add the sushi mixture to the rice before it cools fully and then shuffle. Fanning the rice allows the grains to have a nice glossy sheen, which is important to the presentation of the sushi. The filling should be prepared while the rice is cooking. I put the crabmeat into a food processor with the mayo and some rice vinegar. If you can, use Japanese mayo instead.
Now the difference between what I learned from my mother, and what I do now, is to place the rice on the sushi mat, then the nori on top of that. This is called an inside-out roll and allows for a nicer presentation. Let it stand for five minutes, then cut in half and keep doing so until you have six to eight pieces. The rolls will look like little pink, green, and white spirals.
When my mother began to cut my California roll for me, my mouth began to water. It looked so good I wanted to reach out and grab a piece. When I remember that day, I see it as happening to someone else. That was one of the few times that my mother had time for me. Over the years, the change in my relationship with my mother from one of fearful adoration to one of grudging respect has altered the way I view her life and mine as well. I see that the changes that I have made in my life may have led me down a different path than hers, but we will still end up at the same destination.
Melissa L. Llanes Brownlee