When I was a child, rice cakes were something we only ate around New Year’s. Now, you can have them anytime you want. Even so, we still decorate Kagami-mochi (round mirror-shaped rice cakes) and eat Ozōni (New Year’s soup) during the New Year. This brings back memories of noshi-mochi. In the Kansai region, Ozōni usually features round rice cakes. At the end of the year, we pound mochi, but we only make round mochi for the first three days of the New Year, and the rest are made into noshi mochi. Even though it’s called noshi mochi, I think there are some young people today who don’t understand it. A wooden box called Morobuta is about 60 cm long, 35 cm wide, and 8 cm deep, and fresh mochi is spread out to fill the box. That is Noshi-mochi. Perhaps it lasts longer than round mochi, which is why they did it that way. The cutting of noshi-mochi into angular pieces usually takes place around these 10 days. As time passes, the mochi becomes firmer, so now is the right time when it still retains some softness. I recall my father spending hours cutting noshi-mochi with a large knife. It’s quite a task to turn five or six boxes of noshi-mochi into cut pieces. I remembered that Noshi-mochi, so I looked into whether such a thing existed now, and it turned out that it did.  You can find many for sale on Amazon and Rakuten. Even though cut mochi is readily available now, I never imagined there would still be a demand for noshi-mochi that requires cutting. Perhaps people buy it out of nostalgia, or maybe there’s some other reason.

子供のころはお正月くらいにしか食べなかったお餅が、今では食べようと思えばいつでも食べられます。それでもお正月にはお鏡を飾り、お雑煮を食べます。それで思い出すのがのし餅。関西ではお雑煮は丸餅が普通です。年末に餅つきをしますが、丸餅はせいぜい三が日分で、あとはのし餅にしました。のし餅といっても今の若い人は分からない人がいるんではないでしょうか。もろぶたといって、縦60㎝、横35㎝、深さ8㎝ほどの木の箱で、それにつきたての餅を箱いっぱいに広げて伸すのです。それがのし餅です。丸餅より保存がきくからそうしたのでしょう。そののし餅を角餅に切るのが大体この10日前後。日が経つほど餅が固くなるので、まだ柔らかさが残る今頃が切り時なんです。父親が大きな包丁で何時間もかかってのし餅を切っていた姿を思い出します。5箱も6箱もあるのし餅を切り餅にするのですから大変です。そののし餅のことを思い出したので、今はそんなのがあるんだろうかと調べたら、あるんですね。アマゾンや楽天で沢山売っている。今は切り餅がいつでも手に入るのに、どうせ切らねばならないのし餅があるなんて想像もしませんでした。買う人がいるから売っているんでしょうね。ノスタルジーで買うんでしょうか。それとも何か理由があるんでしょうか。