Lately, I’ve been remembering the weekly trips my mother and I took when I was a young child to the Ota Tofu factory in Portland’s old Chinatown.
By now, you know my mother was a vegetarian and an early adopter of the health food movement long before those words were mainstream. Vegetarians have to work harder than meat eaters to get enough protein in their diets, and soybeans are an excellent source. Tofu is made from curdled soybean milk and is a staple in the Japanese diet.
Tofu isn’t common in the American diet, so many people aren’t familiar with it. Even when they are, most eat packaged tofu, and few have ever eaten tofu so fresh it is still warm. I think of this as the difference between eating homemade bread right out of the oven versus day-old store-bought bread.
Ota Tofu has been around since 1911 and was a family-run business. The folks who worked there didn’t speak English, so my mother would raise her hand, four fingers pointed upward, and say, “Four, please.” The factory had a bright turquoise door, damp, earthy air, and the sounds of clanking metal. Since we were regular customers, Mother would bring a container; tofu comes in square cakes stored in water.
Mom had figured out delicious ways to cook it, and as a kid, I never minded eating it. She’d make a tofu loaf, similar to meatloaf, and sometimes smother it with Thai-style peanut sauce and serve it over brown rice or noodles.
My favorite childhood story was a book published in 1962 titled Taro and the Tofu. The story was about a boy who lived in Japan. Every day, his mother gave him money to go to the tofu shop, along with a little extra for a stop at the candy store. The shopkeeper was an old woman who wore big glasses and never looked up from her newspaper. One day, Taro saw some candy he couldn’t resist, so all the tofu money disappeared there. I don’t remember how the book ended. Mother must have read that story to me at least a hundred times.
Fast forward thirty years. My son and I frequented Ota Tofu, which by then had relocated to inner Southeast Portland, so he was raised on tofu too. The business was still owned by the same family, probably fourth generation by then. The Ota family lived near us, and all four of Eileen and Koe’s daughters babysat William, one after the other, until they went off to college.
Life is full of unexpected twists and turns, isn’t it? I still eat tofu, and whenever I’m in Portland, I stop by Ota Tofu to get my fix.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mama-san!