Sushi means sour, and it began as fish preserved in rotting rice
Many English speakers assume sushi means raw fish. It actually means sour-tasting, from an archaic form of a Japanese verb for being sour. The name recalls sushi's ancestor, narezushi, in which fish was packed into fermenting rice for months to keep it from spoiling, and the soured rice was thrown away before eating.
That preserving trick probably came from Southeast Asia, perhaps the Mekong or Irrawaddy basins, where fermented fish with rice kept river catches edible. A Chinese dictionary thought to date from the fourth century describes salted fish set in cooked rice to ferment. In Japan, wet-field rice farming meant floods washed fish into paddies, and pickling the surplus secured protein for months. The old style survives in Shiga Prefecture's funa-zushi.
Over centuries the wait kept shrinking. In the Muromachi period, from 1336, cooks developed a partly fermented version in which the rice was eaten along with the fish, turning a preserved food into a meal. Sake and sake lees later hurried fermentation along. Then Edo-period cooks skipped fermentation entirely, simply seasoning rice with vinegar so fish and rice could be eaten at once. This fast sushi spawned the familiar forms: rolls, scattered bowls, tofu pouches and hand-pressed pieces.
Nigiri, a slice of fish over a pressed oblong of rice, took off in Edo, now Tokyo, in the 1820s or 1830s. The chef Hanaya Yohei is often said to have invented or perfected it in 1824 at his shop in Ryōgoku. It was street fast food for townspeople, and the rice balls were about three times today's size, with half the vinegar, a red variety brewed from sake lees, and more salt in place of sugar. Because the fish came fresh from Edo Bay, it was called Edomae, a label still used to signal quality.
Tofu pouches of inarizushi are named for the god Inari, whose fox messengers are said to love fried tofu; in some regions the pouches get pointed corners like fox ears. Plates first rode a conveyor belt past diners in 1958, at Yoshiaki Shiraishi's Genroku Zushi in Higashi-Osaka, and after it won an award at the 1970 Osaka Expo the format spread across Japan, making sushi cheap.
Source: Sushi
