Term · Japanese culture
Onigiri
Cold rice, one salted thing in the middle, a band of seaweed, and somehow the most comforting food in any anime kitchen.
In Otakana the clue reads: Triangular rice ball wrapped in seaweed
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Japanese culture
- Letters
- 7 · Normal
The name comes from a verb meaning to grip, which describes the method exactly. Wet your hands, salt them, take hot rice and press it into a triangle with a filling buried in the centre. Umeboshi, grilled salmon and cod roe are the traditional fillings. Tuna with mayonnaise arrived in the 1980s through convenience stores and has been the best seller ever since.
Convenience store engineering deserves its own note. The wrapper keeps the nori separated from the rice by a plastic layer, and pulling one numbered tab splits the film so the seaweed lands on the rice dry and crisp at the moment you open it. Getting the sequence wrong shreds the whole thing, which happens to everyone at least once.
In English-speaking fandom the food is famous partly for a dubbing decision. The 1990s Pokemon dub had Brock describe two rice balls on screen as jelly doughnuts, and the line has outlived almost everything else about that era of localisation. Modern subtitles leave the word alone.
Spelling ONIGIRI
ONIGIRI is seven letters with three Is, at positions three, five and seven, and finding one of them usually gives you the pattern for the rest. The G is hard, as in give. It starts on a vowel, which is worth remembering because few words in this game do. Omusubi is the same food under a different name, and it is not the answer.