An excerpt from the Albemarle Enquirer, Murfreesboro, North Carolina, December 19th, 1878.
—After the ceremony of the distribution of prizes at the Paris Exhibition, M. Mataugata, Minister of Finance in Japan, and M. Maeda Masana, Commissioner General, gave a luncheon a their official residence. Three Japanese dishes were served; the gokioku-sousi, a sort of sausage of cooked rice and dried raw fish in a skin made of seaweed; the maki sousi, a salad of highly seasoned rice, smoked meat and fish; and the some, a rich vermicelli soup very thick. These preparations are described as very delicate in flavor, and by no means repugnant to European palates.
By the second half of the 19th century it had become common for American newspapers to fill out their pages with short snippets of news and trivia from other sources, domestic and international. For example, this short item is buried down in the bottom right corner of the second page of the Albemarle Enquirer, and is obviously copied from another source. With a bit of digging, I was able to find the original, which is a nearly identical item in the London and China Express, October 25th, 1878.
And, with a little bit more digging, here’s the French original of this article, from the Parisian newspaper Le XIXe Siécle, dated October 24th, 1878.
If you want a sense of how fast news got around in the 19th century, note that it’s one day from French publication in Paris to an English translation and publication in London, and 55 days from London to rural North Carolina.
What’s really important, however, is that this is probably the earliest mention of sushi, here spelled sousi, in an English-language general interest publication. There’s an earlier mention of the word sushi in a Japanese-English dictionary published in 1873, but thus far, I’ve found nothing earlier in a newspaper or magazine. It also seems likely that this is the earliest mention of sushi in French.
A few details in this account need to be straightened out. First, the dishes are mixed up. The two sushi dishes being served are probably gomoko sushi and maki-sushi with the descriptions switched in the piece. Gomoku sushi is a type of chirashi, a preparation in which a variety of ingredients are scattered on top of a bed of sushi rice, in other words, a salad. Maki-sushi is the familiar sushi roll.
And now we have to take a moment, here, to admire the absolute perfection of that description: “a sort of sausage of cooked rice and dried raw fish in a skin made of seaweed.” Brilliant!
My suspicion is that the final dish, somé, is somen noodles in some kind of thick sauce—Le dernier enfin est un vermicelle au gras très-épais—but I don’t know for sure. If you’ve got a better idea, leave it in the comments below.
As for the occasion and the two dignitaries who hosted the meal, the Third International Exposition in Paris is generally considered one of the most important international events for Japanese interests and image in the West. It was a major success in terms of public relations, and Japanese craftsmen and artists won major awards. Given the stakes in terms of PR, it’s not surprising that Japan would send ministerial level officials to oversee their pavilion. Matsukata Masayoshi was one of the most important statesmen of the Meiji period, someone who modernized Japan’s financial system. While Commissioner General Maeda Masana’s success in Paris gave him a leg-up to an important career in late 19th century Japanese politics.
And the party these two gentlemen gave was so successful that it became international news.
P.S. For more unexpected sushi history, please check out my two-part series: The Great Sushi Craze of 1905.
Maybe a somen noodle soup served in the cooking water, thickened by the starch released from the noodles?