Fugu taste3/28/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() I’ve often said that if you say certain things to me or raise certain topics I will turn into a puffer fish in Japanese, a normal sense of fugu is ‘someone with a quick temper’.Īnd puffing up is typically the last thing a fugu does, because the chef fishes it out of the tank live right before preparing it. But it’s what makes these fish famous, even more than their toxicity. It doesn’t do it in an instant, like in the cartoons it takes several seconds. What happens if you catch a fugu unprepared? It’s a puffer fish, so it inflates and gets all spiky. And when you come to fugu, you have to be prepared, and so does the fugu. So when you come to fugu, you have to be prepared. It’s kind of like if in English we wrote aubergine but said it as “eggplant.” But normally, when you see 河豚, you say “fugu,” which is the usual Japanese name for the fish – it’s probably derived from the Japanese word for ‘blow’. If you say them as though they’re one word rather than two, you’ll say “katon,” which is the other way of saying the name of the puffer fish – if you call it that, you can reasonably expect to be understood. Now, if you read those characters one at a time, you will say “ka buta,” which means ‘river pig’ (which is what the Chinese name of the fugu means in the pinyin representation of Mandarin it’s hétún). And the kanji for fugu is a good example of this. Japanese has multiple writing systems used in parallel, and while the hiragana and katakana systems are phonetic (and fugu is most typically written with katakana, as フグ), the kanji system is borrowed from Chinese, and the relation between what you see and what you say has to be learned carefully. Just as preparing fugu requires special knowledge, so does reading the kanji for it. It could be good for blowing out a candle (out, out, brief candle)-slightly less so in Japanese, by the way, because they don’t round the lips for the vowel. It also makes a good vocal gesture: a little puff of air through the teeth, and then blowing through a tunnel (“oo”) with a little echo knock at the back of the tongue. ![]() It may not give your lips and tongue a light tingle, but it does feel like it might be risky. Fugu? Yolo! It’s like an FU to death (or, I suppose, as they say in Italy, fanculo!).Īnyway, the word fugu is fun in the mouth. It may even give you a little tingling in your tongue and lips as you eat it, just as a reminder that you’re eating trace amounts of an extremely potent neurotoxin. So, you know, you almost certainly won’t die. (The people who die from eating fugu these days are pretty much always people who tried to prepare it themselves or had an untrained chef prepare it.) Fugu is a luxury food in Japan, and there are hundreds of restaurants that specialize in it – every one of them with a chef specially trained and licensed in the art of not killing you. But you can charge a lot for the product. You narrow down your target market, sure. That still doesn’t sound inviting, though, does it? It sounds like, uh, bad marketing.Įxcept when it’s very good marketing. So the annual deaths are in the low single digits. Also, there are low-poison versions available. But these days they’re much better at preparing it. Quite famously, in 1975 it killed one of Japan’s most famous kabuki actors, Bandō Mitsugorō VIII. Sure, half a century ago up to a hundred people a year died from eating fugu in Japan. I’m tempted to say “Also, I don’t want to die.” But these days you have a higher chance of being killed by undercooked turkey. It’s just that I’m not in Japan and I’m not going to spend a couple hundred bucks on sashimi. It’s not that I wouldn’t enjoy having fugu. What? Ha ha, no! I’m not tasting fugu, the puffer fish. I’ve been wanting to taste it for a while, and today’s the day. ![]()
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