bonito flake
Cultural layer
鰹節のカビ付けと本枯節 (株式会社にんべん, Ninben, accessed 2026-09-13)
Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art (Shizuo Tsuji, 1980)
Route
PendingThe routes are written. They are not yet mapped.
This entry's cultural layer already names where it came from and how it moved. What it does not yet carry is that movement as structure: ordered waypoints with real coordinates, and a mechanism on each leg. Until it does, the layer stays an empty slot rather than a drawn line, because a map built from prose would be a guess with a projection under it.
1 of 409 entries carries a mapped route · nutmeg is the prototype
- Waypoints
Ordered places, each with its kind
- Coordinates
Real positions, with the gazetteer they came from
- Segments
From, to, and the mechanism that moved it
- Confidence
Documented, attributed or contested
- Summary
What the route argues, in a sentence
Names · co-equal, marked by how each one travelled
FoodwayPresent as a living food culture.
No names recorded.
Connections
9 bonds · 8 sourcedKatsuobushi is the second half of dashi.
Confirmed in Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art: primary dashi, page 148, kelp first and bonito flakes second.
Ichiban dashi.
The defining case of umami synergy. Kombu carries free glutamate, katsuobushi carries inosinate, and the two multiply rather than add: each is modest alone and together they produce a savouriness far beyond the sum. Kuninaka identified the effect in 1957, Ikeda had isolated the glutamate in 1908, and Japanese kitchens had been making the stock for centuries before either.
Akira Kuninaka's discovery of umami synergy between glutamate and 5'-ribonucleotides, 1957 (with Kurihara, Umami the Fifth Basic Taste: History of Studies on Receptor Mechanisms and Role as a Food Flavor, BioMed Research International, 2015) · Glutamate and inosinate content of foods: seafood and cheese (Umami Information Center, accessed 2026-09-13)
Confirmed in Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art: primary dashi, page 148.
Okaka.
Confirmed in Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art: rice balls, page 441, and Tosa soy sauce, page 170.
Miso soup, built on katsuobushi dashi.
Confirmed in Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art: red miso soup, pages 156 to 157, made on primary or secondary dashi.
Okaka, the onigiri filling.
Confirmed in Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art: rice balls, pages 440 to 441, filled with bonito flakes moistened in soy sauce; the name okaka is not printed.
Agedashi-dofu garnished with bonito, and the bonito sauce for yudofu.
Relocated in Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art: deep-fried tofu, page 413, and simmering tofu, page 437. Hiyayakko is not in the book.
Ohitashi, the dressed green.
Confirmed in Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art: soused spinach, pages 429 to 430, garnished with dried bonito.
Egg tofu under a sauce steeped with bonito flakes.
Confirmed in Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art: egg tofu, page 216, served with a sauce steeped with bonito flakes.
Bonds are drawn from culinary literature and origin-tradition references, tiered by source. Origin means a reference from the place. Witness means the pairing is the place's own and the reference documenting it was written from outside.
The score is cultural weight: how central a pairing is in the tradition that documents it. It is not a prediction of how two materials behave in a formulation and not a measure of chemical affinity. The scale is ordinal, because centrality is a judgement rather than a measurement: 1.0 where the pair is the dish, 0.9 a fixed named form, 0.8 a canonical dish, 0.7 recurrent across many dishes, 0.6 common, 0.5 attested, 0.4 marginal or compound-led.
Each score is set against a named dish and carries that dish in its note. Where a score has not been examined it says so, because an inherited figure and a researched one should not look alike.
The dish is named by a reader who knows the cuisine and cites a source appropriate to it. It has not yet been confirmed inside that source page by page, so a note records what supports a score rather than what has been checked in the book.
Studio Culinar-E, "bonito flake", Pantry Archive, Studio Monk-E, 2026. https://studioculinar-e.com/archive/bonito-flake
/archive/bonito-flake
Bonds are tiered by source, origin-tradition references first.