Doria Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Doria is a rice gratin: buttered rice topped with shrimp in cream and béchamel, finished with cheese and baked in the oven. It is said to have been devised around 1930 by Saly Weil, a Swiss chef and the first head chef of the Hotel New Grand in Yokohama.

The dish depends on several things being present at once: dairy, béchamel, and the Western technique of baking in an oven. Butter, milk, and cheese, the means to make a béchamel, and the Western kitchen itself all reached Yokohama across the sea after Japan opened to the world in the Meiji era. Milk shops appeared in Yokohama in the 1870s, and Western cooking slowly took hold there. Only once these tools and techniques had come together could a rice gratin take shape, and around 1930 falls after that groundwork was laid.

The rice at its center was a long-established local crop, on Japanese tables from early on. Onto that familiar staple came a technique from abroad and the setting of the hotel and the Western-style restaurant, and from there the dish worked its way down to the home kitchen. Doria is a modern dish, said to have been born in Yokohama where the local rice and an imported Western cuisine met.

Doria raises two questions. The first is where it was born. In the Hotel New Grand's own account, a banker staying at the hotel felt unwell and asked for something easy to swallow, and Weil improvised a dish on the spot: buttered rice topped with shrimp in cream, covered with gratin sauce and cheese, and baked in the oven. It was well received and joined the regular menu. The hotel's account gives no year; the date of around 1930 comes from later articles and books. Rice gratin built on buttered rice has never become an established dish in France or in Italy, and so Doria is widely regarded as a Western-style dish born in Japan. Still, the story of its beginning traces back to a single line of telling, the hotel's own, and no contemporary document recording that scene has been put forward.

The second question is why it is called Doria. It is also said that Weil named it on the spot after the noble Doria family of Genoa, the line of the admiral Andrea Doria. The hotel's account says nothing about where the name came from. And the idea that Weil thought up the name in the moment does not fit the cookbooks. The second edition of Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire, published in 1907, lists a garnish called 'à la Doria': cucumber turned into olive shapes and stewed in butter, with slices of lemon, laid on fish cooked à la meunière. The book adds a note that dishes by this name were made in different ways, and that it follows the majority in making cucumber the defining element. The name, in other words, was already in use among cooks before Escoffier. In Japanese too, Tokuzo Akiyama's Complete Book of French Cooking (1923) states that an à la Doria garnish must always include cucumber. Before Weil ever cooked in Yokohama, the name was in French cookbooks and in a Japanese one alike. The natural reading is that Weil used a French culinary name he knew from his training.

Where, then, does the name 'à la Doria' itself come from? Japanese dictionaries link it to the Doria family, but another account traces it to a customer of a restaurant in 19th-century Paris. Neither Escoffier's second edition nor Akiyama's book says the name comes from the Doria family, and neither account has yet been confirmed. Even so, the name was not a flash of inspiration on Weil's part; it was a term French cooking already had. The birthplace, by tradition, is Yokohama, and the name came from French cooking. Separate the two, and what is left is not a dish conjured in a single stroke of genius, but one reassembled in Yokohama from a technique and a word acquired through training.