KITCHEN KOTEGAESHI

I was looking at a recipe online today, jotting a couple of notes and calculations, and out of the blue had to chuckle. I’d also been looking at aikiweb and yet another discussion started by somebody wanting to know “the right way” to do kotegaeshi. By my reckoning I’ve been shown at least five right ways. But what does this have to do with recipes?

Several years ago it became imperative to get more whole grains and flax seed meal into our morning routine. I looked over a bunch of recipes for cookies and quick sweet breads and figured out substitutions: non fat yogurt, applesauce, and either honey, molasses, or maple syrup in lieu of butter and refined sugar; whole wheat or spelt flour with oats and flax seed meal instead of white flour. But the whole grains made things heavier and the flax seed meal, a solid, actually added some moist oil to the finished product. So I played on paper with various calculations and substitutions and pretty much every recipe has turned out delicious on the first try: peanut butter cookies, spice cookies, sesame cookies, filled coffee cake, date nut loaf, gingerbread, honey tahini cake, maple pecan loaf.

For tonight I wanted to bake a non-sweet quick bread, probably a variant of an Irish soda bread, to accompany split pea soup. Since my morning recipes already have the grains we need, it was a matter of getting rid of the sweet parts without throwing off the wet/dry ingredient balance or making it tasteless. So this morning I jotted down my basic coffee cake recipe and brought it to work with me. On a break, I looked up some Irish soda bread recipes and compared their proportions of wet and dry to that of my coffee cake. I did a little math (whoever says algebra isn’t a real life skill has never tried to cook, bake, sew or build anything!) and jotted down a recipe.

So what’s the right way to make a cake? Well, first let’s talk about the right ways I’ve been taught kotegaeshi. In most of them, you enter to the attackers side, lining up alongside him. But how do you get there? One way is to simply turn and pivot but another insists on a full tenkan. One has you follow that up with a step forward and then another pivot; another has you step back to make space; a third has you do another full tenkan so you are momentarily back to back with the attacker (and then there’s the reverse kotegaeshi where you don’t enter at all).

Then what happens? The first way I learned was that you use both of your hands on the attacker’s hand and wrist, applying an uncomfortable stretch as your hips turn, so the attacker is projected away. Another dojo taught me to use both of your hands the same way, but to aim the stretch into the attacker’s center so he goes straight down. At a third dojo, you don’t crank at all but simply hold the attacker’s hand and wrist unit in the proper shape with one or two hands at your stable center as you step back. And where I train now, we use one hand to secure the proper shape and the other hand on the attacker’s forearm in order to guide his fall straight down and then, in a continuous movement, to face down (and then there’s the reverse kotegaeshi where you just keep pivoting).

Each of these is immediately recognizable to any aikido student as some kind of kotegaeshi because the underlying principle is the same. Each is “right” in its own dojo, within a larger defined (if implicit) relationship between training partners, with its own conventions for what constitutes a proper attack, how technique is supposed to unfold, and what the norms are for how an attacker engages, connects, resists, or disengages.

So what is the right way to make a quick bread? It depends on what role it will play: dessert? something to melt cheese on? dunk in soup or in coffee? The basic elements are the same. The baker understand the role that each ingredient plays and has a general sense of their relative proportions. If it baked up as a quick bread and it fulfills its role, it was the right way to make it. If your kotegaeshi embodied fundamental aikido principles and resulted in your attacker being taken down safely, it was the right way to do it.