Authentic Japanese-American Breakfast Fried Rice

DECEMBER 30, 2015  26 COMMENTS

My grandmother’s breakfast fried rice, stuffed with bacon and eggs for a quick and hearty meal.

The recipe I’m posting today is one of those family-favorite, special-occasions recipes. Growing up, we always served thisfried rice for birthdays and New Year’s day breakfast. It’s white rice, fried up in bacon drippings, with chopped bacon,mushrooms, and scrambled eggs throughout. Top it with some shoyu or, like my father, slather it in ketchup, and you are starting this year off right!

When I decided to post this recipe, I titled it “Authentic Japanese-American Breakfast Fried Rice,” because I thought that it was a fun play on the fact that this is a recipe taught to my German mother (and then to me) by my Japanese father and grandparents, containing decidedly un-Japanese, very-American things like ketchup and American-style bacon. I always thought it was the perfect natural evolution of a traditional recipe to one more suited to the tastes of its current country. But when I went to my father to double check the recipe’s provenance, he told me that wasn’t actually the case.

According to him, the use of non-traditional meats, and condiments like ketchup, stemmed not from a natural evolution, but from the time my grandparents spent interned at Tule Lake during WWII. These were the ingredients they were served in the camps and that’s where they acquired a taste for them. Unfortunately, neither of my grandparents are still living, so I while I have so many questions, I can’t ask them. But I did a little research and there’s a fascinatingwrite up and short audio story from NPR here with other first-hand accounts about the effect of the Japanese internment camps on traditional Japanese dishes.

I debated changing the recipe name since it wasn’t really all that funny anymore, but recipes have histories, and changing the title felt like deleting this one’s. So I’m leaving the “Authentic Japanese-American” part, because that’s what it is. For better or for worse, it’s Japanese food that America helped shape.

Have you ever had any unexpected discoveries when it comes to family recipes? This is a first for me!