Hōrensō no goma ae

Spinach in sesame sauce

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Credits

I gleaned this from Elizabeth Andoh, At Home with Japanese Cooking (1980). I bought her excellent cookbook while in the first-year intensive course in Japanese at UC Berkeley, back in 1982. This is one of my favorites—especially when made with garden-grown spinach and sesame.

Ingredients

Preparation

Slice off the spinach roots and rinse in a good-sized tub. Chop off the stem of each leaf, and rinse again for good measure. Toss leaves into boiling water and allow them to wilt briefly, for like 30 seconds. Scoop wilted leaves out of the pot, and either rinse in cold water or allow to cool a bit before squeezing them well in a fist. Then chop them. Making a log of it and slicing into sections is enough knifework.

Roast the sesame in a skillet until they pop just a bit. Pour them into a suribachi which still hot, and grind them up. Put in the sugar and continue grinding until it’s a consistent fine powder or paste. Then stir in the soy sauce, followed by the spinach. Stir it all up and you’re done.

This does well in small portions as a side dish, but I’ll sometimes just make a light meal of it with a bowl of rice.