The Japanese Pantry: From Sake to Soy, Essential Ingredients for Japanese Home Cooking

Indispensable Japanese pantry dishes from Emiko Davies, author of Gohan: Everyday Japanese Cooking.

The Japanese Pantry is a follow-up to Gohan: Everyday Japanese Cooking Memories and Stories From My Family’s Kitchen, Davies’s tribute to her mother’s family and her soul food--Japanese home cooking.

In The Japanese Pantry, Davies explores the pantry items essential to Japanese home cooking--simple, easy-to-find ingredients that can be combined with fresh produce and a few other basics like tofu, rice, and noodles to create delicious and authentic Japanese food no matter where you are.

Each chapter explores one of these essential ingredients--soy sauce, miso, rice vinegar, seaweed, sake, sesame, and tea--including information about the history and production of these in Japan, as well as Davies’s thoughtful and approachable recipes. In helping readers get to know these pantry essentials, Davies hopes to give home cooks the confidence to make authentic Japanese dishes that are inherently simple and full of flavor.

Emiko Davies is an award-winning Australian-Japanese food writer, photographer, and author. Growing up in a diplomatic family, she spent most of her life living in countries other than her own, from China to the United States, but has called Italy home for the past twenty years. Davies is the author of six cookbooks, Florentine: The True Cuisine of Florence (2016), Acquacotta (2017), Tortellini at Midnight (2019), Torta della Nonna (2021), and Cinnamon and Salt: Cicchetti in Venice (2022), published by Hardie Grant, and Gohan: Everyday Japanese Cooking, published in 2023 by Smith Street Books, which won the Andre Simon Special Commendation award and the Fortnum & Mason Cookery Book of the Year award. She runs a cooking school and natural wine bar in Tuscany with her sommelier husband, where she shares her passion for seasonal, simple home cooking.