I’ve written before that two of the most important foods to any culture are beans and pickles, two food categories that tend to be closely tied to our respective cultural identities and difficult for outsiders to approach. When Japanese go to the U.S. and eat Mexican food for the first time, they’re invariably turned off by the taste of refried beans, and you can tell a Japanese who’s lived in the U.S. for a couple years because he’s learned to love Mexican food. Similarly, many traditional Japanese sweets are based on anko or azuki, sweet Japanese beans that took me a few years to warm up to. A couple months ago I had the urge to eat one of my favorite foods — tuna salad with extra pickles on a toasted plain bagel — but I was out of pickles. I decided to swing by a local import shop to see what they could offer me, but the only brand of Western-style pickles was something from Germany, with Kühne Gewürzgurken Auslese printed on the label. Ignoring my better judgment I bought a jar, but unfortunately they were not to my taste, though no doubt any Germans passing through my corner of rural Japan would have loved them. In the end I bought a jar of Vlassic pickles through an import company in Kobe called the Foreign Buyers Club, which can get any food for you as long as you don’t mind buying a large supermarket-sized case. Sometimes you just can’t say no to your own culture.
Oddly I couldn’t tell if these were dill or sweet pickles.
