Rice as Accompaniment

Serious rice eaters, who regard it as the staff of life and who feel that, if the meal didn’t include a plateful of rice, then they haven’t eaten at all – such people would consider that the only proper accompaniment to meat, fish, vegetables and other spicy or even non-spicy dishes is plain cooked rice, of the sort described in the previous section. The Japanese even reserve the honourable word gohan for plain white rice. They admit more elaborate rice dishes to their traditional cuisine, such as the sekihan or red rice, but modern rice products, and all foreign rice dishes, are described by the Japanese-English word rais-u.