Takoyaki Period AOrigin theory BVerified

Takoyaki is an Osaka flour snack: a batter of wheat flour poured into the rows of hemispherical hollows on a dedicated cast-iron plate, a piece of octopus dropped in, and each ball cooked through in turn. The octopus comes from the Seto Inland Sea, off Akashi, and the wheat flour was already at hand; the ingredients themselves had long been on Japanese tables.

What was new was the way of cooking. To set batter into round half-spheres, you need an iron plate lined with those hollows. Only once that tool and technique had come together at an Osaka stall did the round takoyaki of today take its form. In 1933 the stall Aizuya, in the Nishinari district of Osaka, sold a ball called radio-yaki, filled with beef tendon and konjac; this was the forerunner of the round-cast cooking.

Aizuya was run by Endo Tomekichi, who came from Aizu in Fukushima. In 1935 he swapped the filling for octopus and named the result takoyaki. The idea of using octopus is said to have come from a customer who told him that Akashi's tamago-yaki (akashiyaki) used it. The dish was born in the middle of the flour-snack stall culture that had spread through Osaka in the Taisho years, a street food of ordinary people.

Takoyaki is loved as a homely local taste, yet its birth is recorded with surprising clarity. The man who devised it was Endo Tomekichi of Aizuya; the year was 1935. Aizuya's own official account of the dish's beginning is matched independently by press reports such as the Nihon Shokuryo Shimbun, by the researcher Mana Kumagai in her book on Japan's flour foods, and by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in its record of local dishes -- and on the person, the year, and the place they scarcely differ. Several records from different sources tell the same line; that is how firm it is.

The story has a prehistory. The radio-yaki of 1933 was filled with beef tendon and konjac. Told by a customer that Akashi's tamago-yaki used octopus, Endo changed the filling, and two years later came takoyaki. The lineage of round-cast savories itself reaches back to akashiyaki, dated to the Tenpo era.

From here on, though, the texture of the record changes. How akashiyaki came about -- that leftover egg yolk from making artificial coral beads was mixed with octopus -- is qualified even in the Ministry's account with "it is said." The origin of akashiyaki stays in the realm of tradition, not confirmed in documents the way takoyaki's birth is.

The phrase "an old Osaka taste" is right enough as atmosphere, but the outline of this one round snack was drawn by a single stall owner in a Showa-era street. The age of the ingredients and the year one dish was born are two different matters.