Coffee Will Make You Black

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Excellent. Much less of a bummer than I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Also, since Coffee Will Make You Black is set in the 1960’s and in an urban setting, I could picture the surroundings a lot easier.

The main character, “Stevie,” has a prim and proper mother and an easy-going pragmatic father, very down-to-earth, and more believable than Maya Angelou’s real parents. She learns about sex, forms her opinions on white people, and watches her nerdy friend Roland turn into a Malcom X-styled activist.

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gyuhi

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What the heck is “gyuhi?” I am thinking it’s like mochi with sugar in it… it’s the main ingredient in a lot of these wagashi recipes.

  • Rice (mochiko or pounded rice)

  • water
  • mizu-ame (sugar syrup)
  • that’s all!

Baby Kasutera vs Namagashi

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When I was in Tokyo a while ago with my friends, we bought a bag of little grilled cakes with sweet beans inside. I had always called these things “manju,” but I was corrected and told they were “baby kasutera.” I have since done a little more investigation.

The general phrase wagashi refers to the whole class of Japanese sweets.

Kasutera is the Japanese rendering of “castella,” apparently a type of sponge cake. They are in a subclass of wagashi called yakigashi, “grilled sweets.”

The type of wagashi I am used to is called namagashi – “fresh sweets.”

  • Most of what I make and consume at home are various kinds of dango (simple sweetened pounded rice), or
  • daifuku-mochi (the kind with the anko inside).
  • I already knew “yokan,” solid bars of bean jelly.