JIPPENSHA IKKU 十返舎一九.

Mochigashi sokuseki zōho teseishū 餅菓子即席増補手製集 [Collection of Quick Recipes for Rice Cakes & Sweets].

Two double-page & six full-page illus. 31 folding leaves. 8vo, orig. wrappers, orig. block-printed title label on upper cover, new stitching. Edo: Preface dated 1813.

Second edition, enlarged and revised (1st ed.: 1805) and very rare; WorldCat locates only the 1970 and 2003 reprints. This work gives 75 recipes for sweets made from rice, beans, wheat, and other ingredients.

Jippensha Ikku (1765-1831), is most famous for his humorous travel novel Shank’s Mare (Hizakurige). In the present work, he applies his wit to confectionaries. “The gap between ingredients and cooking techniques on the one hand and nomenclature on the other is even wider in the 1805 confectionery text assembled by the comic novelist Jippensha Ikku…He includes two recipes for nanban sweets. The first is Southern Barbarian Candy [European-influenced sweets] (nanban ame); the modern editors note it is similar to a recipe in an earlier confectionery text, but that it is not an easily identifiable sweet due to the idiosyncratic way the author miswrote the Chinese character for sugar in the recipe. The recipe that follows for a sweet called Southern Barbarian Kiōsen is even more problematic, since there is nothing called kiosen, which literally means ‘tree yellow decoction.’ The modern editors of the text identify it as a pun on a sweet popular in Kyoto called jiosen. While the editors fault Jippensha Ikku for his sloppiness, he is clearly having fun with words, which are occupational tools for this comic novelist, rather than terms used in the confectionery trade. His southern barbarian sweets, like the recipes in other mid-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century culinary books, indicate that the term southern barbarian sweet had become a free-floating referent that could be used to lend any dish an exotic or comedic air.”–Rath, Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press: 2010), p. 110.

There are also recipes for Korean (Kōrai) and Chinese (Nankin) sweets. In the recipes, we find ingredients such as green Szechuan peppercorns, walnuts, nutmeg, burdock, persimmons, sweet potatoes from Satsuma, and the shoots of bracken (warabi).

The playful illustrations depict steaming and pounding the rice into mochi, boiling rice to make dumplings, toasting the rice cakes, and a scene of a merchant preparing the rice cakes “Kyoto style.”

Nice copy, preserved in a chitsu. Minor worming touching characters and images, carefully repaired.