The friendly folks at
FishBase (
www.fishbase.org)
offer the following lovely definition for "kamaboko":
Elastic or rubbery, heat-pasteurized, Japanese style fish cakes made from minced fish, with starch for thickening, and sugar, salt and monosodium glutamate for flavoring.
Sounds
yummy, doesn't it? But perhaps an easier
way to describe
kamaboko is as
fish sausage.
The food has a long history (the earliest known reference in literature dates back to 1111 AD) and many Japanese towns (eg.
Hakone) pride themselves on their
kamaboko. Originally primarily a food for travelers,
making
kamaboko was one of the few ways to
store fish before the advent of refrigeration.
Even today, the All-Japan Fish Sausage Association (
Zenkoku Kamaboko Rengokai; www.zenkama.com) offers reviews, recipes, history
lessons and nutritional information about this omnipresent (at least in Japan) processed fish product. There are many different types, but perhaps the most common is a long white block with one edge tinted red for esthetic reasons.
So how are kamaboko used? Well, many a Japanese starts their day with a slice as a part of a traditional
Japanese breakfast. When slurping noodles at lunchtime, the typical bowl of soba or udon has some kamaboko floating on top. For dinner, kamaboko are
a obligatory part of many nabe stews,
especially oden. And even when downing a few
brewskis at the local izakaya
deep-fried slices of kamaboko,
called satsuma-age, are almost as popular as
dried squid.