Search for fulfillment
By Brooke Leister
THE METROWEST DAILY NEWS
Sunday, August 10, 2003

When most people reach a standstill in their life, whether from workplace frustration or personal conflict, they seek a diversion. Perhaps a new hobby, a new job, a new social circle.

For Victoria Abbott Riccardi this simply wasn't enough. The Newton resident wanted more.

For her, it meant traveling to the other side of the world, integrating herself into the culture of Kyoto, Japan, and learning the ancient art of tea kaiseki, a ritualized form of cooking accompanying the formal tea ceremony.

It was a year that changed the course of her life and one the author eloquently describes in her book "Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto."

Riccardi, 42, will discuss her recently published book at the Newton Free Library on Thursday, Aug. 14, at 7:30 p.m.

Riccardi's culinary endeavors began as a small child growing up in Manchester, Mass. As a 7-year-old, she made her first recipe -- Betty Crocker's Polka-Dot Macaroni Bake, a dish of creamy elbow pasta topped with hot dog slices.

"My mom is a great cook and growing up she was always an experimental cook. She was always trying new recipes and bringing new products home....I've always felt you can learn so much about a person and the culture by seeing what they eat," Riccardi said.

Around the same time she began experimenting in the kitchen, she received a postcard from her grandparents, who were visiting Japan. The card featured two maiko, or apprentice geisha, feeding orange carp in a mossy garden. The image has never left her.

"I still have the first postcard they sent me," she said of her grandparents, who visited Japan many times. "I would have it in my desk (growing up) and would be doing my homework, probably math because I never liked it, and would think, 'Wow! What an exotic part of the world.'"

Years later when she became disenchanted with post-college life in New York City, the Harvard graduate left an unfulfilling job at an advertising agency, a serious boyfriend and a rent-controlled apartment to pursue two passions -- the culinary arts and Japan.

She decided to study tea kaiseki in the city her grandparents adored -- Kyoto.

"I was attracted to so many aspects (of Japan) -- the minimalism, the food, the quietness, the otherwordly quality," said Riccardi, who left for Japan in 1986.

When she arrived, Riccardi, also a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, had no job, no place to live and spoke only sushi-bar Japanese. Through personal contacts and friends she made in Japan, Riccardi was able to attend one of Kyoto's most prestigious tea schools, where she learned the art of preparing a meal.

"It's like a ballet. It's a seamless, very elegant way of making tea," Riccardi said of the ceremony.

In Japan, tea ceremonies are held in tea houses. One must be invited to attend the ceremony, which could include 10 food dishes and seven courses. The dishes are not the super-sized portions Americans are used to, rather they are small bites. The ceremony typically lasts between 4 and 6 hours.

"Tea kaiseki began in the temples. The foods are actually quite simple. They use tofu, miso and vegetables in season....What I really took away from this experience is when I cook for someone I see it as a gift for the person. Preparing the food for tea kaiseki -- it's really a gift from the heart," Riccardi said.

In Japan, traditional tea ceremonies are also meant to open the doors to spiritual enlightenment.

"The concept is you leave the material world behind and you enter the spiritual world. As you walk the path to the tea house you are symbolically stripping yourself of all cares, worries and concerns," Riccardi said.

Some of the same can be said about Riccardi's time in Japan.

"When I came home even my mom said I was different. I came away much calmer. It was this deep sense of peace and tranquility that I was able to leave with," she said.

She still treasures her education in tea kaiseki.

"With tea kaiseki you always give people just enough. Leave them wanting just a little bit more so they'll remember the experience and cherish it," Riccardi said.

Victoria Abbott Riccardi will discuss her book "Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto" at the Newton Free Library on Thursday, Aug. 14, at 7:30 p.m. For more information about this free event call 617-796-1360.

Year in Japan was a study in subtlety
By Naomi R. Kooker, Globe Correspondent
The Boston Globe
8/6/2003.

NEWTON HIGHLANDS -- When Victoria Abbott Riccardi returned from a stay in Kyoto, Japan, 17 years ago, friends stopped her, wondering how she had changed. Did she cut her hair? some asked. ''They couldn't really pinpoint it,'' says Riccardi, as she prepares a Japanese lunch in her home here. In fact, what was different about her was that she felt calmer, more reflective, less bothered when things didn't go smoothly.

Riccardi is making chawan-mushi, an egg and dashi custard, in small ceramic Japanese bowls she brought back. Using chopsticks, she places an uncooked shrimp beside a scored shiitake mushroom ''because the visual part is just as important.'' The custard is part of tea kaiseki (pronounced ky-seh-kee), the elaborate small dishes -- bite-size appetizers, really -- that precede the traditional tea ceremony. Kaiseki is an ancient Buddhist practice. ''When guests attend a formal tea ceremony,'' writes Riccardi in ''Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto'' (Broadway Books), a culinary memoir, ''they usually receive a kaiseki meal to prepare their stomachs for the tea.'' The dishes change with the seasons.

Riccardi's time in Japan, she says, ''took me far beyond sushi.'' She lived with a Japanese family, studied tea kaiseki at a prestigious school, took and taught language classes, shopped in the markets, dined, cooked, and tried raw chicken. ''It tasted like fish,'' she says. ''It was more of a texture thing -- frighteningly delicious.''

Riccardi, 42, took to the unspoken nuances of a culture that depends greatly on a ''silent way of doing things. So many hidden things in Japan,'' she says, her hands cupping an imaginary treasure box. She went to Kyoto because her grandmother, an avid gardener, went there and loved the gardens. Riccardi still has the first postcard she ever received from her grandmother, from Kyoto. Years later, she says, ''I would pull it out and look at it.''

After some courses in East Asian studies as a student at Harvard, and after studying at the Paris Cordon Bleu when she took time off between her sophomore and junior years in college, she had the idea of Japan in the back of her mind. Then her grandmother died. Riccardi left her job at the McCann-Erickson ad agency in New York and went to the Far East.

The experience changed her, especially the way she cooks. ''I think about it a whole lot more,'' says the native of Manchester. With her chopsticks, she places cubes of tofu in palm-sized, shell-shaped cups; she twists green tea noodles onto square black plates. Her favorite pair of eating chopsticks -- dark wood, square and wide at one end and tapered to a point at the other -- shares a ceramic pot with other cooking utensils, including her cooking chopsticks, a ''beat-up'' pair of Chinese chopsticks. She always carries a pair of disposable wooden chopsticks when she travels.

She uses the cooking chopsticks for sauteing shrimp or testing pasta to see if it's done, as well a myriad of other cooking purposes. But when it comes to ingredients, she admits Japan has made her a purist. ''There's a reason why certain cultures put certain things together,'' she says. In her own kitchen, she doesn't mix Eastern and Western foods. For instance, she won't use dashi, a stock made with bonito fish flakes and kelp, when she isn't making Japanese food, and ingredients indigenous to the European table don't find their way into her Asian dishes.

Her husband, John, she says, likes large portions, pungent garlic, and bold flavors. She calls him her ''abbondanza Italian.'' He doesn't always get the subtleties of Japanese culture. ''The two parts of my world collide,'' she says, then corrects herself. ''They don't collide. I respect each one for what it is.''

When she's not dining with her husband, who is the director of the Office of Foreign Programs at Boston University School of Law, Victoria Riccardi will often grab sushi at Brookline's Fugakyu, her favorite place. She buys Japanese groceries at the Kotobukiya in the Porter Exchange Building in Porter Square, Cambridge. If she orders takeout, she won't eat in public -- that's considered rude in Japan -- although she concedes that before she didn't do much of it anyway.

Riccardi left Kyoto at a moment when she felt content and satisfied but not quite ready to go. In a way, her leave-taking mirrors the way Japanese behave around food. ''In Kyoto, if you overstay your welcome, you're offered another cup of tea,'' Riccardi explains. All visitors understand the hint: ''You know it's time to go,'' she says.

Three years ago, to complete the book, Riccardi returned to Kyoto to experience shojin ryori, a Zen temple vegetarian meal thought to be the origin of tea kaiseki. Kyoto had changed dramatically. ''One of my biggest disappointments was finding Starbucks,'' she says. ''Three of them!''

Her kaiseki lunch is a feast of flavors, textures, and shapes presented on red placemats, served with tall glasses of iced sencha, a green tea. Riccardi sits back in her chair. She has done something at this meal that is so subtle, only a student of kaiseki might catch it. ''Do you notice anything about lunch?'' she asks. Is it the hidden heat of fresh ginger under tufts of scallion on the tofu? Or the way the green tea soba noodles glisten with the dark liquid of dashi, soy sauce, and mirin?

Neither.

''The whole lunch is green and white,'' she announces. These are the cooling summer colors in Japan. The irony, of course, is that the Japanese would never tell you. If you didn't get it in the first place, then you would never know.

This story ran on page E1 of the Boston Globe on 8/6/2003.
� Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

By HSIAO-CHING CHOU
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER FOOD WRITER
Wednesday, July 16, 2003

A temple door, a bamboo grove, the folding and unfolding of a paper fan -- or oneself. These words, in the hands of Victoria Abbott Riccardi, become images of Kyoto, Japan, that linger in the mind, fluttering like tree leaves in a breeze:

"There was also an ingenious approach to limited space through the use of folding and unfolding. Gardens unfolded themselves as you walked along. Fans folded open and then collapsed back into their compact shape. Meals unfolded through multiple courses. Even people folded themselves inward to create private worlds in public, staying silent on buses, covering their book jacket with plain paper and closing their eyes on the subway."

It's a passage that appears early in "Untangling My Chopsticks" (Broadway Books, 283 pages, $23.95), a culinary memoir that unfolds Abbott Riccardi's year of discovery in Kyoto, studying the art of tea kaiseki. Included are 25 recipes inspired by the meals she experienced.

Tea kaiseki, Abbott Riccardi explained during her recent visit to Seattle, is an art form that is Japan's highest cuisine, which accompanies the formal tea ceremony. The cooking uses simple, seasonal ingredients and simple methods because it came out of Buddhist temples. And because the food is meant to lead guests to the tea, which is the star attraction, the portions are small and not intended to sate the appetite.

To become a tea master and understand all the rituals, rules and the symbolism of the food as well as its presentation, requires years, if not a lifetime, of study. Abbott Riccardi simply wanted a taste of the discipline to satisfy a yen for immersing herself in the Japanese culture, which had been introduced to her by her grandparents' travels.

She was a couple of years out of college and working in advertising in New York when she decided to move to Japan. It was the late 1980s. She left everything that was familiar and everyone who loved her and whom she loved, including her boyfriend (now husband), to find a different self.

While she was in Kyoto, she not only got the taste she sought, but learned how to taste. Her palate had been desensitized by the bold flavors she was accustomed to in the United States. In Japan, subtleties are revered and people pride themselves on being able to distinguish among dozens of varieties of miso or tofu.

"The longer I stayed, the more I tasted," she said. "I came home a slightly quieter person, and I left New York."

Abbott Riccardi hopes that her book gives readers a glimpse behind the shoji screen of Kyoto. Indeed, it does. In the way that Kyoto's soft, traditional ways can disarm you, Abbott Riccardi's words whisper an evocative story that leaves you wanting more.

To support herself, Abbott Riccardi taught English in various language schools. In the end, she got a teaching opportunity that would allow her to stay another year. She decided against it, having learned from kaiseki that it's better to leave room for desire.

"In the West, it's about accumulating more, getting higher. In Japan, I came to appreciate stepping away from a moment still wanting. In tea kaiseki, it's fundamental that there's just enough food to give flavor and to make them remember it and want more."

Foodies whip up a batch of savory memoirs
By Ayesha Court
USA TODAY
July 7, 2003

Whether Tom Jones is being seduced with it in Henry Fielding's 1749 classic or Marcel Proust is remembering things past with one bite of a madeleine, describing food's sensuous pleasure is a long-standing literary tradition.

But now a cornucopia of foodie memoirs is being served, in which authors celebrate their lifelong love of food. Whether written by chefs such as Jeremiah Tower (California Dish, Free Press) or such world-traveling foodies as Abe Opincar (Fried Butter, Soho Press), the books have one thing in common � a joyous revelry in good food even when the memories evoked are bittersweet.

This summer brings a range of titles: Rosemary and Bitter Oranges: Growing Up in a Tuscan Kitchen (Scribner) by Patrizia Chen; Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto (Broadway Books) by Victoria Abbot Riccardi; Candy and Me: A Love Story (Free Press) by Hilary Liftin; and Return to Paris by Colette Rossant (Atria Books).

Though owing much to MFK Fisher's food and lifestyle books, this new trend started in 1998 with food critic and current editor of Gourmet magazine Ruth Reichl's first memoir, Tender at the Bone (Random House), says Free Press publisher Martha Levin.

"I was smitten � it was hilarious," Levin says. "She wrote about food so sensually and with so much passion."

Tender became a best seller, as did Reichl's follow-up, Comfort Me With Apples, despite chronicling her painful divorce and an affair.

But in 2000, when celebrity chef and Food Network star Anthony Bourdain broke into the best-seller ranks with Kitchen Confidential (Bloomsbury), revealing what really goes on behind the swinging kitchen door in top restaurants � sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll � it whetted publishers' and readers' appetites even more.

Considering that more than half of Americans are overweight and millions try a new diet a week, reading about mouthwatering food might seem masochistic.

So why now? Depends on whom you ask.

"I think people love eating," says Levin. New York's "Union Square Caf� has become a tourist attraction, and there are probably 15 cities with destination restaurants now."

Others see it differently. "After 9/11, a lot of people stopped traveling," says Tracy Behar, editorial director at Atria Books. "I think people just want to curl up with a book like this when they can't get to Paris."

Cathy Langer, book buyer for Denver's Tattered Cover bookstores, agrees.

"There's more staying at home and feeling like you want to nurture that part of your life."

But whether there will be a breakout like Bourdain or Reichl this summer is an open question.

"Although it is a popular genre, it's hard to predict," says Langer. Though books by Calvin Trillin, Bourdain and Reichl are perennial strong sellers, Langer says the new memoirs "don't always hit."

Traditionally, foodie book fans have been well-educated, middle-aged women, dreaming of a home in Tuscany or Provence. With this new crop of memoirs, booksellers and publishers are already seeing more younger � and male � readers sampling foodie books. But it still takes a foodie to love a foodie, says Levin.

"There's a whole brand of tourists making the Olive Garden their destination, and they're not buying these books," she says.

BOOK REVIEW�Summer Reading
The New York Times
June 1, 2003

UNTANGLING MY CHOPSTICKS: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto by Victoria Abbott Riccardi. (Broadway, $23.95.) Riccardi, a trained chef and disaffected New Yorker, spent a year in Kyoto studying kaiseki, the ceremonial cuisine developed by Buddhist monks as a guide for meditation and enlightenment.

By Irene Sax, 
Epicurious
May 28, 2003

This is the story of a pilgrimage. Tired of life in the corporate world, Victoria Abbott decided to leave advertising, leave New York, and leave her boyfriend to go to Japan and study kaiseki, the arcane and highly symbolic series of dishes that are served before a traditional tea ceremony. In the course of that pilgrimage, Abbott learned a lot about food and cooking � much of it extremely specialized and seasonal � but even more about life in Japan and, finally, about herself. When she decides to leave Japan and go back home, it's because she has learned that it's best to end a meal before you are completely satisfied. It's a fascinating journey, even if you never intend to make horse mackerel sushi and pickled romaine stems or eat grilled sparrows' heads.

In ''Untangling My Chopsticks,'' Victoria Abbott Riccardi reports on a year in Kyoto spent studying kaiseki, the ceremonial tea cuisine that originated with Buddhist monks in the city's Zen temples. A trained chef who found herself toiling mindlessly in a Manhattan advertising agency, overwhelmed by New York and sick of her life, Riccardi sought refuge in a discipline developed by tea masters who used the rituals of food preparation as guides for meditation and enlightenment. ''Untangling My Chopsticks'' sets up a cultural and culinary dichotomy: the chaos, stress and wanton appetite of American life versus the order, calm and self-control of traditional Japan.

Though she has a sense of humor (I loved her account of a foreigner's linguistic confusion: '' 'We are nanagwpkm shmplup,' called the chef from the eel restaurant. 'Do you chiwksha morplmraka?' ''), Riccardi is too busy immersing herself in kaiseki's daunting forms and rituals to spare much time for laughter. She compares this ancient kind of cooking to writing haiku, with the tea master as poet: ''Every ingredient,'' she notes, ''means something.''

Kyoto confectioners who provide sweets for the tea ceremony name their products after historic figures or events -- like the one, recalling a heartbroken imperial concubine, that has a ''teardrop of salty fermented soybean'' at the center. A pine-needle-shaped piece of yuzu zest placed in another dish symbolizes the coming New Year, while three stems of wild chervil tied together and dropped into the kelp broth of a chopstick wash conveys the host's invitation to come back again. And then there's what Riccardi calls ''the auspiciousness of certain numbers.'' Serving one slice of something is bad luck because the Japanese word for ''one piece'' can also mean ''kill someone,'' while the word for ''four'' can also mean ''death.'' The potential for grave hermeneutical offense should give any wannabe kaiseki adept the willies.

At times, the kaiseki teachings suggest a mania for order and regimentation. Rules govern proper teahouse dress, right down to the type of knot on the sash that fastens a kimono, and they determine how much distance the guests must leave between each other on the walk from garden to tea room (because they need ''the appropriate personal space,'' Riccardi explains, ''to transition from their material self to their spiritual persona''). At the meal's end, the guests drop their chopsticks on their trays ''in one synchronized movement'' to signal that they're done -- ''a subtle moment,'' Riccardi writes, ''unbroken by the coarse call of human voices.''

No wonder she didn't like New York. In fact, this high degree of formalism is so alien to our casual, practical American sensibility that you might almost forget that kaiseki is, after all, about eating. When Riccardi's boyfriend arrives for a visit and complains about the paucity of a kaiseki meal (''I'm still hungry,'' he says afterward), she scolds him for ''not realizing that visual satiation was all part of the feast.'' One woman's enhancing ritual is one man's confining rule. To those Americans unable to find liberation in constraint, tea cuisine may pose a confounding inversion of the ideal meal: a million dos and don'ts, and precious little on the plate.