No Shark Cartilage? Almonds Will Do for a Salad

Then a bite of something pink and crunchy in a viscous dressing stopped me cold. The texture was somewhere between almonds and raw spaghetti. The flavor was tangy, fishy and pungent — I recognized umeboshi (pickled plums), flying-fish roe and sweet mirin (rice wine). And I couldn’t stop from devouring it.

“Shark cartilage,” my friend said with a wave of her chopsticks. “They eat it as a bar snack in Tokyo. It’s very authentic.”

Days later, still enamored with the crunchy tartness of the dish, I wanted to recreate the experience for my husband, Daniel. But given the dearth of shark cartilage at my local supermarket, faithfully reproducing it wasn’t an option.

I had to think of a substitute. Though nothing could quite compare to that singular crunch, perhaps a combination of ingredients might mimic it.

If I tossed slivered almonds, squid and juicy nuggets of cucumber with pickled plum paste and mirin, I’d be hitting the major flavor and texture notes. Hardly authentic, but it might do the trick.

An added bonus was that all of the ingredients, except the umeboshi (Japanese groceries and large health-food stores carry it), are readily available at most supermarkets.

Although the dish at Zenkichi was chilled, I decided to make a warm salad to bring out the contrast between the soft squid and crisp almonds.

I toasted the nuts in a skillet, then sauteed the squid, adding mirin and umeboshi. Then I piled it all onto the cucumbers.

The whole thing looked a little drab; it needed color. I scanned the pots on the deck and noticed some renegade purple shiso from last year’s planting, a welcome weed. I tossed it into the salad.

Then Daniel and I dug in. The salad was sweet, delicate and nuanced, a little tangy from the plum paste and herbal from the shiso, but not fishy or intense. In short, nothing like shark cartilage.

Was that a sigh of relief escaping from Daniel’s lips? (He is a little cartilage-leery.) No, it was sigh of contentment, and that was fine by me.