Once when I asked Cho who had taught him all this stuff, like how to press rice into little oblongs for sushi, or what to boil to make dashi for miso-shiru, or how to make perfect agedashi tofu, he told me he’d learned it all from a French chef at a hotel where he’d worked in Paris. I was shocked. “When the original no longer exists,” he said, “there’s nothing you can do except look for the best copy,” which sounded to me like some sort of riddle — such a scary one that I couldn’t bring myself to ask him what it meant.
