San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
New year, new traditions
A Japanese-Jewish feast for Tsukimi and High Holy Days
In a light-filled Hayes Valley apartment kitchen, Kristin Eriko Posner is shredding ginger on a Japanese ceramic ginger grater. She moves quietly around her galley kitchen with a zen-like aura, looking completely at peace. Ginger is for the meatballs in her tsukune “matzo ball” soup, which marries the eastern European Jewish tradition of matzo ball soup with Japanese tsukune, chicken meatballs typically served in izakayas.
“Some people are afraid of butchering their traditions, but we have to adapt and update them if we want them to survive,” says Posner, 33, while gently mixing ground chicken thighs with ginger, green onions and sake. She adds organic white sesame oil from Wadaman, a 130year-old family-owned company in Osaka, Japan. “Most of what I make is not traditional, but inspired by it,” she says.
Posner’s life is one giant mashup of cultures. She is the daughter of a Japanese immigrant and a thirdgeneration Japanese American via Hawaii. Her paternal grandmother immigrated as a picture bride; in the early 1900s, some Japanese women were matched with U.S.-based Japanese husbands using photos and family recommendations.
When Posner’s grandparents passed away, many of their cultural and religious traditions, like Buddhism, were lost. For so long, she felt like an outsider, not American enough in the U.S., not Japanese enough when she visited Japan — a common feeling for children of immigrants.
When Posner married her husband, Bryan, a secular Jew, she realized that if she wanted to pass down Jewish culture to their future children, she would have to be the gatekeeper. She converted to Judaism and was bat-mitzvahed in the spring. “It makes me feel connected again, refreshed,” she says.
To her, Judaism just felt right. As she learned more about its wellpreserved traditions, she was inspired to dive deeper into her Japanese heritage. “It was my rabbi who challenged me when I was struggling to balance both cultures. ‘Why can’t both be in your life?’ he asked.”
So she started taking Japanese tea ceremony classes about seasonal serving dishes and wagashi ( Japanese tea sweets). She also created her first mashup recipes, including her tsukune “matzo ball” soup.
She loved her mashup life so much, she decided to create a lifestyle brand, Nourish-Co, which features guides (check out her audio tour of San Francisco’s Japantown), recipes, events and, eventually, products. Mostly, she hopes to connect with other people looking to meld cultures and create their own rituals to save their cultural heritage.
Posner continues to cook her High Holy Days menu, moving on to what she calls a Jewish donburi. A donburi is a Japanese rice bowl, topped with vegetables, fish or meat, and it’s something her mother made often when Posner was a child. Her new version starts with a bed of Japanese short grain rice topped with a salmon fillet, cucumbers, slow-roasted Early Girl tomatoes, pickled red onions, fresh dill and an everything bagel spice mix.
She finishes with her dessert, mochi drowned in a river of apple honey syrup, a Jewish wagashi described as an edible prayer for a sweet new year. It’s an ode to both of the Jewish High Holy Days (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) and the Japanese harvest moon festival Tsukimi (Sept. 24).
It takes respect and interest in both cultures to properly represent her own, new culture. The day Posner converted to Judaism, she called her mom. “I didn’t think she would get it, that I had found a place where I belonged and was accepted,” she says. But her mother understood, explaining to Posner that she once felt similarly estranged from her Japanese culture when she got her American citizenship decades ago. Just the thought of her mom feeling like she didn’t belong is enough to bring Posner to tears.