After digging a hole in the ground, heat some stones over a fire, put in the food wrapped in leaves, and cover with leaves, grass, or soil. Steaming in this way produces a juicier result than roasting directly over a fire.

Ishi-mushi cooking, which uses the heat from baked stones, is a cooking method that can be done without earthenware. A baked stone was found at the Fujikubo-Higashi Ruins (Miyoshi-cho, Saitama Prefecture), one of the oldest Paleolithic sites in Japan, and its charred remains suggest that "stone may have been used as a cooking utensil. Therefore, we came up with a dish in which ingredients from the Musashino Plateau are steamed and grilled, based on the stone steamed dishes still eaten today by the indigenous people of Oceania.

This soup combines seasonal shellfish with seaweed and seasonal wild plants. The ingredients are placed in a Jomon Earthenware vessel for several hours to slowly extract the flavor of the shellfish, and salt is added at the end.

Saitama Prefecture is now a "sea-less" prefecture, but during this period, the "Jomon sea advance "^*4 extended the coast inland, and many shellfish mounds have been found because of the abundance of clams, oysters, and other shellfish that were harvested. One of these shell mounds, Mizuko Shell Mound (Fujimi City, Saitama Prefecture), is a village that flourished about 6,000 years ago, and as many as 50 shell mounds are lined up around the village. In the Jomon period, the sea was unpolluted, and the local people must have been able to catch high-quality "natural" seafood. The soup made by boiling shellfish tastes like soup with shellfish broth. There is a theory that one of the origins of dashi is shellfish soup from the Jomon period. It is possible that our ability to sense the "umami" of dashi may have been nurtured by the shellfish soup of the Jomon period.

After mashing the nuts on a stone plate, use wild yam or quail eggs as a "binding agent" and bake on the stone. If you like, you can add egoma or asa no kernel to enhance the aroma. When using horse chestnut nuts, it is important to remove the scum from the nuts thoroughly. Soak the dried horse chestnuts in running water for a few days, then add the ashes and boil them in an earthenware vessel for a few more days.

Yabutsuzu azuki is boiled from water, then once the water is discarded, water is added again and the beans are boiled until softened. Add honey at the end to make a sweet soup stock.

The Shimoyakubu Site (Higashimurayama City, Tokyo) is a site where excavations to date have revealed remains and artifacts from the Late Jomon, Kofun, Nara, and Heian periods. Because the site is located in a "low marshy area" with abundant groundwater, many plant materials, such as nuts and wooden tools, which would have rotted elsewhere, have been excavated, making it a treasure trove of information.

For example, a lacquered wooden spoon found in the excavation revealed that people at that time grew poison oak trees and collected its sap, which they used for gluing, waterproofing, and coloring. We also found traces of how people removed the scum from horse chestnuts, how people planted legumes, and how they used the heads of wild boars in ceremonies.

Among the excavated artifacts, we found yabutsuru azuki stuck to the bottom of earthenware vessels. From this, we thought, "They would have boiled and eaten the azuki," and recreated oshiruko (sweet red-bean soup).

Your brain and organs are working even while you sleep, so when you wake up in the morning, you are out of energy. For breakfast, we recommend cookies or oshiruko, which are high in carbohydrates that provide immediate power. It is also a good nutritional supplement before lessons or cram school! Since bones and muscles are built while we sleep, stone-baked or shellfish soup with meat as its ingredient is recommended for dinner. 3 dishes are low in vitamins that protect us from viruses and cleanse our skin, so pumpkin salad, stir-fried dishes with bell peppers such as chinja-roe soup, and Add a pumpkin salad, a stir-fry dish with bell peppers such as chinjaolo soup, or kiwi fruit after the meal to make a well-balanced meal.

We asked Ms. Kumagai, a curator, and Ms. Yamane, a nutritionist, about their impressions of the dishes they recreated and the difficulties they encountered in recreating them. What do elementary school students and Paleolithic/Jomon-era people have in common?

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