Sushi Started as a Way to Throw Out the Rice and Eat the Fermented Fish

Sushi as it appears in a Tokyo restaurant today — bite-sized fingers of fresh seafood pressed onto vinegared rice, eaten in two minutes — is actually a startlingly recent invention. The deep ancestor is narezushi, fermented fish, which originated in the Mekong basin in present-day Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam at some point in the first millennium BCE. The technique exists for storage, not cuisine. Freshwater fish are gutted, salted, packed in cooked rice, and left in pots or wooden boxes for months. The rice's starches break down into lactic acid; the resulting acidic environment preserves the fish for the better part of a year. The original way of eating narezushi was to scrape off and discard the rice, and eat the fermented fish.

The technique entered Japan along trade routes from China and was the dominant form of sushi for nearly a thousand years. Funazushi, made from carp on the shores of Lake Biwa, is still made the same way and tastes, by general agreement, like an extremely strong cheese.

The modern dish — nigiri-zushi, raw or lightly cured fish on a small fingernail of vinegared rice, no fermentation involved — is conventionally credited to Hanaya Yohei, an Edo (Tokyo) street-food vendor working around 1824. The shift was from preservation to speed. Edo's working-class chōnin neighborhoods were dense and hungry; Yohei's nigiri took thirty seconds to assemble at a stall, ate in one bite, and used the bay's freshly caught fish without months of waiting. The portions were about three times the size of a modern piece, with more salt and less sugar in the rice. The form crossed Japan via the railways in the late nineteenth century and reached the United States in the 1960s through Roy Choi's predecessors in Little Tokyo.