[How Did Gyoza Begin in Japan?]
Do you like gyoza (dumplings)? On a recent business trip to Tokyo, we could finally visit Ginza Tenryu. This famous gyoza restaurant had been recommended to us many times by the staff of our Ginza showroom. The famous yaki-gyoza (grilled dumplings) are a combination of plenty of gravy and light red bean paste wrapped in moderately elastic skin. The delicious-looking grill marks on the large gyoza make you want to eat it all at once while it is still hot. Today, I want to devote my body and soul to this "yaki-gyoza." While savoring the gyoza with such feelings, I suddenly wanted to know how the gyoza started in Japan.
Going back to the history of gyoza, traces of food discovered in the ruins of an ancient Mesopotamian civilization around 3000 B.C. are thought to be the original food from which gyoza was made. It consisted of a flour skin wrapped with ingredients and heated. Later, when it was introduced to China, dumplings began to be made in China around 600 BC. Dumplings in jars have been found in dried form as by-products of burials at ruins from this period.
Gyoza was introduced from China to Japan in the Edo period (1603-1868). Who was the first Japanese to eat gyoza? It was Tokugawa Mitsukuni, the second lord of the Mito Tokugawa family, who became the model for the famous Japanese period drama "Mito Komon." In actuality, Komon-sama was not a traveler who went around the country, but rather a person who laid the foundation for a major project that began with the compilation of a Japanese history book titled "Dai Nihon Shi (History of Japan)", continued as a project of the Mito clan, and was completed in the Meiji era (1868-1912).
In the book "Shunsui Shushi Dan Ki," which Mitsukuni ordered to be compiled, a dish called "fuku tsutsumi" appears as a dish presented to Mitsukuni. The dumplings were made with duck meat as the base, and pine nuts and wolfberries were used for the filling. The main focus of "Shunsui Shushi Dan Ki" was on the Confucian scholar Shunsui Shu, a Ming Confucian scholar who defected to Japan and answered questions from his students in Japan, and in the section on the theme of "eating and drinking," moon cakes were introduced in addition to dumplings. Mitsukuni lived to be 73 years old at a time when the average life expectancy was said to be 50 years, by incorporating Chinese herbs into his diet and by actively including seasonal vegetables in his one soup, three-course meals, based on the idea that medicine and food are of the same origin. I wonder if dumplings also played a role in promoting people's health. However, since meat consumption was banned in those days, gyoza was never popular among the general public.
However, Chinese restaurants serving dumplings existed even before the Meiji era, and cookbooks of the time introduced how to make them: "Home Chicken and Egg Dishes: Supplemental Chinese Cooking" published in 1924 lists chicken dumplings as "chicken boiled in a bun." It is said that the common people began to eat dumplings after the Japanese who returned from the former Manchuria region of China after World War II and attempted to reproduce the local dumplings became widespread. The thin-skinned baked dumplings were favored as an easy-to-eat side dish with rice, in keeping with Japan's staple food of rice. In the beginning, lamb meat was used as in Manchuria, but it was soon replaced by ground pork, and cabbage, garlic, and chives were added to make it mainstream. The garlic was originally used to remove the smell of mutton, but since it also went well with pork, it is still used in many gyoza today.
Rikucho Ogasawara's Frying Pan, currently on display in the Ginza showroom, is an excellent tool for baking delicious grilled gyoza. You can enjoy perfectly browned ideal yaki-gyoza at home. The Ginza Showroom is a 4-minute walk from Ginza Tenryu, so please stop by after filling your stomach with delicious gyoza.
Rikucho Ogasawara's Frying Pan
https://www.shokunin.com/en/rikucho/fryingpan.html
Ginza Showroom
https://www.shokunin.com/en/showroom/ginza.html
Ginza Tenryu
http://www.tenryu-ginza.jp/concept
References
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%A4%83%E5%AD%90
https://mog-lab.com/2024/03/post-304.html
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A7%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E5%8F%B2
https://www.printing-museum.org/collection/looking/74831.php