Writing about food: Sumo Size Me, from Michael Booth's "Sushi & Beyond"
"It was lunch time: what I had been waiting for. ... Amused at my interest in his lunch plans, Sumo Monster explained that he was making a chanko nabe, the traditional sumo hotpot. 'There are lots of different kinds,' he said. 'Maybe as many as ten. We all take turns to make it and each of us has a specialty. This is a chicken and soy sauce one.' He chopped daikon radish then carrots into a pot of simmering water seasoned with soy, as if sharpening a pencil ... . He then added half a ladle of salt. Did he have a recipe? 'No, this is man's cooking, we don't really worry about the details. The important thing is that there is enough -- this is how the chanko nabe developed. Sumo stables used to be much larger, up to a hundred wrestlers, and they needed a dish that could be cooked in one pot but feed many.' With Sumo Monster engrossed in his chanko nabe I took my chance to sneak a look into the fridges. Instead of the cakes and chocolates I was hoping to find, they were full with sweetcorn, tofu, chicken, and other vegetables -- a veritable showcase of healthy eating.
"The lunch spread, though relatively healthy, was on an impressive scale. As well as the protein-rich chanko nabe, there was omelette, rice, cocktail sausages and, of all things, fried spam ... . We barely made an impression on the amount of food at the table, and left them to enjoy their well-earned feast and afternoon beauty nap."
I attended a morning sumo practice and lunch at a shrine a couple of years ago. During the practice I couldn't stop obsessing about how if I stepped, even a little, onto the sacred sumo dirt place I would instantly pollute it because of my woman parts. They'd have to get the Shinto priests to come and purify it for the fat guys to be able slap each other around again safely. I felt guilty ten years ago at my father-in-law's funeral ceremonies when the Shinto priest waved around sacred branches in his pure white garments and I was there quietly menstruating, polluting everything.
The chanko nabe was superb because the wrestler in charge made the broth from scratch, no instant dashi with MSG. I can taste MSG, I don't care what people who can't tell the difference say about it. You can or you can't. There were deep-fried things, a large mayonnaise noodle salad, other things I avoided. It was a hot summer day and who can eat so much besides wrestlers. The stable master asked me if I liked sweets and when I said I didn't, complained about the foreign wrestlers who did, and how obscenely large food portions were in the U.S. when he traveled there. Heh. Then the wrestlers bathed and had their hair done and took naps.
