Untangling My Chopsticks by Victoria Abbott Riccardi Page B

casual kimonos, were pouring themselves coffee in the kitchen. Futons, quilts, and pillows lay tossed about the tatami.
    “You know,” I said brightly, “I can easily come back. In fact,” I said, heading back down the stone path, “why don't I just get some coffee and return in an hour.”
    “No, no, no,” said Stephen, beckoning me back. “We need to start cooking. That means you two as well,” he said, gesturing to his male houseguests. They rolled their eyes in mock disgust.
    “You get a cup of coffee and I'll put on some clothes,” said Stephen, handing me a chipped green mug.
    While Stephen dressed, I made small talk with Brad and Kyle, who, as it turned out, were studying tea at one of the big three tea schools. Neither one was sure how long he wanted tostay in Japan, so each had enrolled in the school's one-year program, which was taught in English. David was their teacher.
    “I want to practice making sweets,” said Brad, stirring milk into his coffee. Stephen enjoyed making sweets for David's tea ceremonies and would often invite David's students to help.
    Nowadays, it is fairly unusual for a tea master to serve homemade sweets, not only because of the time and skill involved, but also because Kyoto is so famous for its tea confections. Numerous old wooden shops, which have been in business for hundreds of years, have well-deserved reputations for the quality of their jellies, bean pastes, and sugary tablets.
    Aside from the gorgeous colors and shapes of their confections, these Kyoto artisans are known for the poetic names they give to each sweet, particularly the moist ones served before the thick tea. Often based on notable historic events, characters, or even quotations in Japanese literature, the sweets become a kind of riddle that fits into the underlying theme of the tea ceremony. At the confectioner Shioyoshi-ken, for example, there is a special sweet named after Princess Kogo, a famous imperial concubine, who became so heartbroken when the emperor outgrew his love for her that she fled to a nunnery in the western region of Arashiyama. In the center of the sugary sweet lies a teardrop of salty fermented soybean—a reminder of the bittersweet nature of love.
    The more ambiguous these thematic hints (and they are not just limited to the sweets at a tea ceremony), the more thrilling the discovery for the tea guests, if, indeed, they ever solve the riddle.
    Stephen came into the kitchen sporting a jolly watermelon-pink shirt and pants the color of grape jelly. He beckoned me over to a sitting area near the sink. “Did you bring a notebook?”
    I nodded.
    “Good, pull it out.” He collapsed on a stool, letting his legssplay open. I sat down Indian-style on the stone floor with my notepad on my knee.
    “First of all, you need to understand the courses of a tea kaiseki and the ones we're going to serve today,” he said, rubbing his nose. “The stuff we made in class last week, those are part of osechi ryori (honorable seasonal cooking), or New Year's foods. They might show up in different parts of a New Year's tea kaiseki, but they're not all that you'd get.”
    I scrawled what I could as Stephen went on to explain the various dishes we were going to make that day and how they followed the format of a traditional tea kaiseki. Despite his best intentions, he often veered off on tangents related to such things as his love of trees or his difficulty with finding comfortable shoes in Japan. But as he jackrabbited around the subject of tea kaiseki, I was able to piece together his remarks and ultimately understand the order and number of dishes served at a traditional tea kaiseki meal.
    In reaction to the lavish honzen ryori–style kaiseki that the aristocracy favored in the sixteenth century, a movement arose to create a more frugal style similar to the “medicine” meals the monks ate in the temples before their whipped green tea. Sen no Rikyu is credited for this new perspective, known as the