You measure your donabe, get 32 cm, and go looking for a 32 cm trivet. It is not there. The largest rush ring on sale is 24.8 cm. The largest brass one FUTAGAMI makes is 18 cm. Nagatani-en — the Iga workshop that makes Kamado-san, the most famous rice donabe in Japan — sells a trivet for its own…
Buy the one-gō box, about 85 mm square, in plain kiso hinoki, and keep it for cold sake you already know you like. That is the answer for almost everybody, and the reason has nothing to do with taste: a gō is 180.39 ml, the box was cut to hold exactly that, and every other size on…
A chawanmushi cup is a serving vessel, and almost everything that decides whether the custard comes out silky or full of holes happens somewhere else — in the steamer, at 85–90 °C, with a cooking chopstick wedged under the lid. Buy the cup for the table and for the arithmetic: 200–275 ml, filled to eight-tenths, and a…
Buy a miso soup bowl by its diameter, not by the millilitres beside it. The everyday size is 11.7 to 12.1 cm across — 3 sun 9 bu to 4 sun, in the unit the Japanese trade still uses on the tag. The capacity figure is close to useless here: a 12 cm owan is listed at 340 ml, and a…
On the oldest English-language tea forum there is a thread titled “Tokoname Replacement Lids?” Somebody had broken the lid of a Japanese teapot and wanted to know where to buy another. The thread is still there. It has no answer. That is not neglect. It is the answer. For almost every Japanese kyusu worth owning,…
Two shops in the United States will sell you a tonsui today. One files it under “Tonsui Dipping Saucer”: 4.53 inches across, 5.2 fl oz, $3.80. The other calls it a hot-pot bowl for individual portions: 13 cm, porcelain from Gifu, $28. Both are using the word correctly. Neither page mentions that the other kind exists. So the first…
A yukihira nabe is the small, dimpled, one-handled pan that is in every Japanese kitchen and almost every Japanese restaurant. Buying one looks like a choice between sizes. It is really a choice between three things, in this order: whether your cooktop can heat the classic version at all, whether the dimples on the pan…
Buy the 27 cm square. Not because it is better made — at this price nothing is better made — but because a sheet of nori is 21 cm wide and 19 cm deep, and a 24 cm mat leaves you five centimetres of bamboo to finish the roll with. That is the whole size question. It has one…
Buy the tray that contains the dishes you already own, not the one that matches the number of people you feed. A Japanese tray is not a carrying device with a nice finish. It is the outer edge of one person’s meal, and its size was settled by what goes inside it several centuries before…
Japanese offices still teach tea service as a procedure, and the first instruction in it surprises people: do not put the cups on the saucers. Carry both on the tray, cups standing in a row and saucers stacked beside them. Set the tray down on a side table. Then lift each cup onto its saucer,…