A confession of the best kind: scandalous and unimportant.

When I eat sushi, it’s an excuse to dip a lot of rice in soy sauce. In my younger years I found the combination of rice and soy sauce heavenly. I would drench the grainy white fluff in the earthy brown froth, let it pool at the base. Quake in anticipation of the ambrosial bliss. Close my eyes as I lost myself in an ecstasy of umami.

“You shouldn’t do that,” my parents would advise. “Too much soy sauce is not good for you.”

I understood that. So I would carefully curtail my consumption of soy sauce. Sprinkle instead of pour. If you pour too recklessly you’ll exceed rate limits and raise alarms. Sneak in an extra drizzle late in the meal if you can do so without raising suspicion.

Then I was introduced to sushi. It was just raw fish over rice, with a dipping bowl of soy sauce. Or, as I saw it: two of my favourite things, served together in an Officially Sanctioned Dish, plus raw fish.

I understand there’s a Right Way to Eat Sushi. In a sushi restaurant in Tokyo we silently observed how an older gentleman, balding and dignified, dipped his sushi into the sauce-plate. With his chopsticks he rotated the sushi a quarter-turn before picking it up, and another quarter-turn before he dipped it, so that the fish absorbed the soy sauce while the rice-bed was left pristine. The purpose of the sauce is to adorn the fish.

But to me, the fish is almost incidental, a mere vessel for the consummation of the union of Rice and Soy Sauce. I can distinguish different selections of fish by taste only about as well as I can distinguish different selections of wine by taste. I stick with the common selections, tuna and salmon, because I can depend on them to appear on most every sushi menu and I’m accustomed enough to them that, as sideshows, they won’t get in the way of the main attraction.

That is my confession.

Amen.