Kanazawa

The son of the owner of the ryokan I was staying at in Kanazawa, on the north coast of Japan, was one of those ‘go out of the way, no matter what, to help you’ kind of people that you come across so frequently in Japan. Once he knew I was a chef, his helpfulness reached a level that, if it weren’t for his genuineness, would have almost bordered on the uncomfortable.
Suddenly itineraries were made, visits organized, reservations sorted.

One visit was to a fish market. It was an overwhelming experience, with an array of sea creatures quite new to me. One in particular was a box full of white lobes, all connected in some sort of fashion by a thin membrane. I pointed to the box and in my broken Japanese asked what it was. The owner’s son, with a sly, slightly embarrassed grin on his face, paused, and said, “ It is white, it is from a cod, it is from a male cod”. Seconds passed before I think I understood what he was saying. He gave me the Japanese name- shirako. I would later learn the literal English translation is ‘white children’, which is a truly wonderful euphemism for semen.

The rest of the tour of the market passed with less interesting discoveries, however my interest in shirako was taken as a desire to try the stuff, and so a booking was organised at a local restaurant.

I arrived at the restaurant, Renin written in English above the door. I had had the day to get my head around eating shirako (if I can eat salmon roe, surely I can eat the male equivalent), but being offered a small bowl of raw cod’s sperm with chilli and a soy dressing was possibly a little more challenging than expected.

Looking around at this point, possibly as a delaying tactic, it was now that the name of the restaurant got some context- the walls were covered with pictures of John Lennon. It wasn’t Renin, it was Lennon.

With the chef watching, I could no longer avoid the bowl of ‘white children’. Being connected lobes, it was a choice of eating the whole bowl at once, or biting through the slippery, white sacs. I chose the former, and well, they were actually pretty fine. Creamy, yes. Fishy, definitely. But all in a good way, and the ponzu dressing cut perfectly through its richness.

Cod’s sperm was just the first of many firsts when eating seafood in Japan. They are the masters of nose to pectoral fin eating. And in fact, eating all the parts of any animal. Eating a chicken’s egg without an unformed shell and its cloaca, grilled on a stick over charcoal?- too easy.