Chicken thigh and blunt lengths of Japanese negi alternated on a skewer over charcoal
Origin: Tokyo & Japan
From the journey of Spring Onion.
Negima is the first thing most people order at a yakitori counter and the one by which the shop is judged, because it is the skewer with the least to hide behind. The name is a contraction, and an odd one. Negi is the onion; ma is short for maguro, tuna. In the Edo period the skewer was made with fatty tuna belly, which was then cheap and unfashionable and considered fit for grilling with onion. As tuna belly rose in status and price it was replaced with chicken, and the name stayed, describing an ingredient that has not been in the dish for a century and a half. What makes it work is a genuine exchange between the two components. The chicken thigh renders fat as it cooks, and that fat runs down and bastes the onion. The onion, in turn, holds a great deal of water, releases it as steam, and keeps the chicken from drying over the coals. Neither ingredient does as well alone, and the alternation on the skewer is functional rather than decorative. The onion must be naganegi, the thick Japanese long onion, cut into blunt lengths of three or four centimetres. Grilled properly it blisters and blackens outside whilst the interior collapses into something close to jelly, sweet and slippery and quite unlike a raw onion. The choice at the counter is tare or shio: the sweet soy glaze, or simply salt. Purists order shio for negima on the grounds that the glaze masks the onion, and they have a point.
Naganegi is sold by Japanese and Korean grocers and is the right thing: a single thick white shank, mild and sweet. The nearest substitute is the thickest spring onions you can find, or the white part of a slender leek, though leek is firmer and wants an extra minute. Charcoal is a genuine improvement here rather than an affectation, because much of the flavour comes from fat dripping onto the coals and smoking back up. A griddle pan works but gives a different, flatter dish. The tare keeps for weeks in the refrigerator and improves with reuse. Traditional shops maintain a single pot for decades, topping it up rather than starting again. Order or make shio at least once. Without the glaze you taste the onion clearly, which is arguably the whole point of the skewer. The same skewer with thick spring onion and pork belly instead of chicken is common in izakaya and equally good.
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