ИСТИНА

On December 4, 2013 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) agreed to register washoku – a traditional Japanese cuisine and social custom handed down from generation to generation expressing Japanese people’s respect for nature - as an intangible cultural heritage. However, in the history of Japanese food culture there are numerous facts that clearly show that Japanese cuisine, in its present form, is the result of a combination of original Japanese, Chinese and European cooking traditions. It is the recipes of Japanese sweets that clearly reflect the foreign influence on Japanese food culture. In other words, Western recipes have been interpreted in a new way and integrated in the Japanese cuisine. In 2015 a well-known web source produced by the Nippon Communications Foundation published a top-five list of the traditional Japanese sweets. The article states that despite the fact that chocolate and western-style confections are both very popular in Japan, the nation has its own traditional treats. Nevertheless, it should be noted that if we try to trace the roots of the so-called traditional Japanese sweets (yōkan, manjū, dango, kasutera, oshiruko) we will find out that some of them emerged far from the Japanese archipelago and were completely modified in order to match the local taste preferences. My research is based on different types of historical sources such as the culinary essay Chef's Records (Hōchōshoroku, 1652) by сonfucian scholar Hayashi Razan (1583-1657), one of the first Japanese cookbooks Tales of Cookery (Ryōri monogatari, 1643) and handscroll Excellent View of Our Prosperous Age (Kidai Shōran, c. 1805). I will focus on Japanese gastronomic curiosity as one of the national peculiarities, trace the tangled history of some confectionaries in Japan and analyse the changes foreign recipes have undergone.