Cuisine is the best way to know the region
Kurihara’s cuisine is mostly famous for a mochi dish which is mainly eaten during times of celebration. Mochi is a Japanese rice cake made of mochigome rice. There are a variety of mochi dishes in the Kurihara region. A few decades ago, mochi was an extravagant cuisine loved by children.
Kurihara Tourism Network Food Research Group has researched Kurihara’s local dishes, how to cook them, their ingredients, the best season to eat certain foods, and other such food-related topics for three years.
We realized that Kurihara actually has a rich regional history after researching these local dishes. For example, mochi dishes were eaten 70 days a year before the Edo Period. During most of the Edo period, half of the total rice distributed in Edo (current-day Tokyo) was transported from Sendai Date Domain (currently Miyagi pref.), including the Kurihara region. This meant that a lot of Kurihara residents didn’t have enough rice because Sendai Domain bought most of their rice to sell in Edo. The farmers thought they could eat more rice if they make offerings of mochi to their ancestors. Therefore, Kurihara’s people had a lot of opportunity to eat mochi dishes.
Our food culture, recipes, and traditional customs have been handed down from our ancestors to us. They made various improvements to culinary techniques depending on the times. In addition, our regional food culture has many original and ingenious ways to satisfy one’s hunger, such as a snack called kate-shoku, which is eaten while working in the fields. Various non-perishable foods were also invented.
We summarized our research findings in a book and introduced them at cooking classes and events. We would like to tell people about our city through our food culture, and we look forward to sharing our traditional values such a home cooking with as many people as possible.
