Cooking for the honorable season

New year's food is called osechi ryori, 御節料理.
御節 -- honorable season
料理 -- cooking


This honorable season is the time of New Year's, one of the three times in the year when most Japanese can almost count on being able to stay home and sleep. (That's what most of my friends here tell me is their main wish for most holidays.) The others are the first week in May and the middle of August. But New Year's is the only one of these three which is chock-a-block with traditional activities, most of which involve food. (Many of the others involve alcohol.) At a minimum, most Japanese spend the first three days of the year eating as much traditional food as possible, even those who eat machine-made sushi and Big Macs the rest of the time.


The changes of the seasons used to be a big deal in many cultures. In Japan, they still are. The Vernal Equinox is actually a national holiday here. But there's a problem in placing New Year's in its proper position in the annual round of celebrations. The fact is, it moved when Japan switched from the lunar to the solar calendar on January 1st, 1873.

Because of that switch, the whole calendar thing is a mess in Japan when you want to talk about traditional festivals. After all, tradition demands that you have traditional festivals on their traditional days. But in Japan, most of these festivals (I'm tired of using the word traditional and having to italicize it every time) have been switched to follow the Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian new year starts on the first day of the first month. Well, so does the traditional lunar new year. But the lunar calendar starts when the Sun enters Pisces, while the Gregorian (solar) calendar starts with the Sun way over in Capricorn, about 10 days after the winter solstice. (Don't you just love all this astronomy talk in a food blog?)


So in Japan, the traditional ancient Chinese holidays that fall on the third day of the third month, the fifth day of the fifth month, and the seventh day of the seventh month, fall on March 3rd, May 5th, and July 7th rather than roughly two months later. And, to bring this back to the subject of New Year's food, New Year's festivities in Japan are centered around January 1st even though most of them have to do with Toshigami-sama (歳神様), a god who isn't supposed to arrive until it's almost spring.


It's a problem particularly for something that's supposed to happen on the seventh day of the new year. On that day, according to a tradition that dates back who knows how far (meaning I certainly don't) you're supposed to eat nanakusagayu (七草粥), seven herb rice gruel. Obviously, you can only eat herbs that are in season (unless you live in the 21st century, where plastic greenhouses make all seasons the same, agriculturally speaking). Those seven herbs are NOT naturally found in the dead of winter. (I found the list of herbs, with a recipe and directions for nanakusagayu, at another blog, Create Eat Happy.)


Actually, some of the seven herbs are perennials, but their strongly green colored leaves aren't at their best on frosty mornings and seri ( セリ　water dropwart) isn't usually available in January, though I think I've seen it in the markets before the end of February. However, you can buy it on January 6th, presumably fresh from the greenhouse.