muffen

I agree having a set breakfast order is more socially acceptable than a set pizza order. But its not enough; its never enough.

As front of house my regulars were always a welcome sight, an easy serve and clear, a guaranteed a happy customer and pleasant interaction. Especially in diners or lunch spots where reliable turnover = tips and most people never come in more than once, having a familiar face who’s rhythms and tastes you recall makes the rest of your service work easier.

One of the first times @petermorwood and I were in, we’d arrived (as usual) on a red-eye and crashed early due to the jetlag, then (also as usual) woke up in the middle of the night, starving. Staggered out of the hotel and across Broadway into Nick’s (me in a new fake-chinchilla coat that was wonderfully soft and very warm but made me look like a linebacker). Peter was in the mood for something Greek, and got the lamb kebab with the tsatsiki and pilaf. I had one of those gigantic burgers they specialized in. Peter spotted retsina on the menu and said, “Hey, yeah, we haven’t had that since [the SCBWI conference in] Hydra…!” …No argument from me: I like it too, if it’s not too resinated.

We ate and drank and ate some more and drank some more (we were there for some hours and killed two bottles of that retsina, it was unusually good…): then, as the dawn was breaking, made our way out to go crash again for a few hours and start working our way into East Coast time so we could get business done.

The next time we got back to NY (a year later? Two perhaps? It was summertime, anyway…) we turned up for lunch about halfway through the visit, and the guy at the front pizza oven turned around and called to one of the other staff, “Hey, it’s Grey Fur Lady and Retsina Guy!” And were instantly made welcome as if we’d only been gone a few hours.

(And when Peter asked Big Nick, later, about the sobriquets: Nick just kind of grinned and said, “They told me you were easy to take care of. You tipped nicely. …And you two drank two bottles of retsina and didn’t trash the joint.”)

During Postwar occupation by Americans, Japan was experiencing massive shortages for the raw materials needed to make soy sauce nationwide, and was forced to rely on exported materials from America to make production. A single American woman named "Ms Appleton" was given total control of apportioning all American soy bean rations to companies, how much, and to who. She had no knowledge of soy sauce, allegedly.

She apparently had so much power over Japanese soy sauce production that she could singlehandedly shape its future by threatening to not give soy beans to any company, family, or factory which did not utilize her specific requirements of semichemical fermentation (reduced from chemical fermentation, since it was that abhorrent). These days, the term soy sauce is distinct from traditional shoyu, and requires distinguishment because of such a radical difference the two products are.

Here's the problem, folks:

I can find absolutely no evidence that Ms Appleton ever existed. There are no sources about this specific period in Japanese history that I'm able to definitively confirm. All of the sources which reference Ms Appleton are referencing in circles with each other; there is no listed source for any of them. Kikkoman's official English website is a veritable goldmine of information regarding this piece of history, with an entire 4 size 13 paragraphs. It not only gives me a first name, Blanche, but also tells me she worked for General Headquarters and that her policies and decisions shaped governmental policies heading into the future.

Except any variation of searching for Ms Appleton, Ms Blanche Appleton, and so on gives me absolutely no information about her ever existing. By appending keywords such as Ms Blanche Appleton+soy sauce, or Ms Blanche Appleton+GHQ, we can find the same couple of sources that are circling each other--or, in the case of the latter, only Kikkoman.

But there is NOTHING else. I'm getting pageantry from some minnesotan town; I'm getting world war 2 veteran records and obituaries when trying to follow that route; I'm getting k-12 teachers and a Titanic survivor named Charlotte. There is no fucking evidence of a Blanche Appleton to substantiate these claims.

And this is fucking massive. Because there should be way more information on her if this was the case; she was apparently powerful and influential enough during the occupation that she could singlehandedly enforce whatever arbitrary rules she wanted on the soy sauce industry and they had to comply or else have no product at all. That level of power is fucking insane. Imagine having so much raw influence over Japan that you could order them to completely renovate and change how they produce and make SOY SAUCE, literally one of if not THE most important thing in Japanese culinary history--and yet there's absolutely zero reference to this outside of like, three specific sites, and none of them have sources, or if they do, they source those sites.

What the fuck is happening here? There shouldn't be radio silence about this woman. There should be records of her policies, there should be legal documents in America which record how she apportioned out American exportation of soy beans to Japan, there should be sources talking about this woman's ability to transform Japan's soy sauce production so heavily that today only 1% of all soy sauce is made with pre-WW2 traditional techniques.

So if she's that big a deal then why does she not exist?

This is a translated page of Kikkoman's .co.jp website, with an apparent picture of Ms Appleton.

But this says that she has an apparent good knowledge of soy sauce brewing--directly contradictory to the Kikkoman.com claim that she had "no experience". And it also claims she was in charge of GHQ, which I'm going to assume is a mistranslation, but still.

I am at the point where I am genuinely considering the possibility of Blanche Appleton never having existed. There is the chance that Kikkoman invented an 'ambassador'-type person with high influence in the General Headquarters during the occupation to grant itself apparent influence/validity/power above the rest of the competition. "The woman who controls all soy materials coming into Japan visited our main factory and said she liked us :)".

It's incredibly fitting that my first act of serious investigative journalism is about soy sauce. Like, I'm a little annoyed at how on brand this is for me. Of course I'm overly invested in this weird little nitpick about soy sauce. Of course I'm making this the government's problem.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

your little toesies will not be harmed!!

ଘ(੭ˊᵕˋ)੭* ੈ✩‧₊˚

a few of of my favorite goncharov reviews on letterboxd