Soul food: Jun Tanaka on his grandmother's crab salad My parents, brother and I used to visit our grandparents, who lived with our cousin in an ancient house with a thatched roof, high above the town of Okayama in Japan. We loved it there. I remember my grandmother as an excellent cook, but my mother, who really is a good cook, says she wasn't much good at all. When we stayed there the thing that intrigued me was the visit, three times a week, of the fishmonger's handcart piled with horse mackerel, yellowtail, squid and salmon heads (the collar is a real delicacy when salted and fried. My mother makes it still - she asks in Waitrose for free salmon heads!). Our special treat was a live crab, which my grandmother would cook in a pan of boiling water. I know it sounds cruel, but when I was six I was fascinated; the crab would make a squealing sound as the air came out of its shell. For dinner there would be crab salad plus salted cucumber with rice vinegar, a pinch of sugar, mirin, soy sauce and grated ginger. My grandmother picked out the crab meat herself, pretty roughly. These days in the restaurant we go through every single little piece very carefully, but with hers you'd find the odd bit of shell - it didn't matter. However the thing we children loved best about her kitchen was a huge jar filled with umeboshi salted plums.