Gifting Melons to the Shining Prince

This chapter focuses on solving the mystery of cuisine during the Heian period (794–1185), Japan’s classical age, when court literature, poetry, and arts flourished. While literature from the era often addresses the carnal appetites of courtiers, accounts of actual foods and foodways are largely absent. The chapter puts together Heian-era references to food from various sources, including Buddhist morality tales, historical anecdotes, and poetry, to produce an account of the era’s conflicted attitudes toward food as a source of both guilt and pleasure, and as an important means of mediating human relationships. It also reveals that the foods of classical-era courtiers diverged from the contemporary “hallmarks of Japanese cuisine” such as aesthetics and seasonality, relying heavily on preserved and dried foodstuffs and served on plain, round dishes.