Rath’s book is the thin edge of a wedge that pries open the culinary world of early modern Japan, revaling exciting possibilities for future research while highighting the need to fill in blank areas in the English language literature on Japan. If a cuisine is defined as a cultural system made up of ingredients, techniques, preferences, and deliberations, there is no intellectual (as opposed to practical) justification for limiting one’s investigation to cookbooks or the writings of chefs and gourment. There are potentially many sources touching on various aspects of Japan’s culinary heritage. The conceptual sophistication and elegance of the world of professional cooks and food aficionados, as is evident in their drawings, formulas, crypto-historical references, and religio-philosophical ruminations, are intriguing indeed, but to avoid a partial and elitist view of premodern Japanese foodways, scholars will need to case their nets widely, to investigate sources of folklore, geography, famine relief, and agronomics for evidence of an early modern Japanese cuisine shaped and championed by chef-writers but ultimately transcending their specialized genre