Re: what is the daily meal for a professional sumo wrestler?

[abe@kaleida.com (Masumi Abe)]

At  6:06 PM 8/15/94 +0000, Tony wrote:
>So, do you know what kinds of food they will eat in tlunch and dinner e.g.
>how many bowls of rice, what kinds of soup and how many grams of meats etc.?

Tony:

Do you really think anyone will answer to your question?

I will answer to your question only the following way.

All rikishi belong to a heya will be fed one way or the other.

The ingredients of Chanko are up to the "chanko-ban" and possibly "okami-san".
Chanko-ban means rikishi, usually from jonokuchi and jonidan ranking, who
is assigned to be in charge of cooking that day. Okami-san is the wife of
oyakata who owns the heya.

The higher ranked rikishi will be served first, thus the higher the rank
the better he could eat. Oyakata usually eat separately from rikishi.
Oyakata's family eats at their living quarter.
If they were short with ingredients, the one suffers will be the rikishi at
the bottom of the rank. If you are the unlucky rikishi at the bottom of the
list, all you could get could be only a bowl full of rice and the soup part
of chanko-nabe.

Since they don't serve chanko like when you are at the restaurant, (there
are no particular serving size), you can't tell how much they will eat.
Each rikishi will eat chanko until he gets satisfied.

In the case of having Chanko-nabe, rikishi sit around the chanko-nabe on a
fire place or a stove, and rikishi will serve themselves to eat, while
lower-ranked rikishi put new ingredients into the cooking pan and serve the
higher-ranked rikishi with whatever the request he gets from them.

As I mentioned before, there are no limitation to the variety of chanko
recipe. Soup could be miso-based, salt-based, soy sauce-based,
chiken-based, fish-based, seaweed-based, mushroom-based, other
vegitable-based, other meat-based, or any combination of above, or whatever
you like. As long as they are edible. Chanko-ban needs to be creative but
will be in trouble if he failed with the reasonable requirement, both
quality wise and quantity wise.

I've heard that many of them shop at Tsukiji market for better quality with
better price.

Through these experience, a never-cooked teen-age-boy will get a quality
experience to be a cook for a Japanese restaurant or open a chanko-nabe
restaurant when he needs to quit from sumo community.

-Masumi

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Masumi Abe                               阿部　加史（あべ　ますみ）
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