It was never
supposed to be a “thing”.
When did it start? Was it in 2012 when a friend taught Yuli how to make peach jam and they sealed a jar in a water bath for the first time? Or was it when they made their first batch of pickles in 2018? Or maybe it was more like the first time they made pickled green beans and stuck them on a charcuterie board for the family and everyone asked where they came from?
Did it really start getting going when Yuli made their first, second, or third batch of kimchi, having to buy increasingly bigger and bigger boxes to store it in to keep up with family & friends demands. It was probably the first time Aaron’s Korean uncle, who knows how to make kimchi, had some of Yuli’s and said he liked it.
Maybe that’s when Marubashi Preserves became the Thing we swore it would never be.
Aaron has always talked about what it would be like to open a sandwich shop or cafe in one of the many, many small towns we have driven through and stayed in all over Ontario. We also talk a lot between us about how we’d like to visit all the 100 year old still-in-the-family run ramen, katsu and bento shops all over Japan we see on YouTube.
Wouldn’t it be cool to live in a shipping container home? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a small studio? What if we also had a place by the side of the road to sell the things we make. So many what-ifs, and wouldn’t-it-be-nices from a pair of elder millennials just trying to make rent in downtown Toronto.
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One of us, ( hi it’s me yuli 👋), is neurodivergent and disabled. The other works hard in a demanding field that has them alone and outside all day. One of us is Japanese Canadian (it’s Aaron and where the name Marubashi comes from, actually it comes from his great-grandfather Hanshichi "Harry" Marubashi, the first of his family to move to Canada in the 1920s, but that’s a story for another day). One of us is a White Settler from Alberta (Welsh and German if you need to know the flavor of White) and the other has only known Southern Ontario since his family was given the not-much-of-a-choice of relocating here from BC after the war.
About the food.
Yuli grew up sitting on a stool watching their grandmother cook. Eileen, probably a fellow undiagnosed neruo-spicy person, did not like to have people in the way in her renovated to her very particular specifications kitchen. She also didn’t go in well for substitutions to recipes, following them to the letter. Yuli could not be more the opposite. While still diving deep into any cookbook they can for the technique and science behind food and cooking, they are happy to run free and trust their knowledge.
Though there was one area of food that gave them pause, preserves. Fascinated by the science that goes into pickling, salting, dehydrating, preserving and fermenting, Yuli was scared away by the idea of failure. Until one day in 2012 when a friend showed them how to seal jam jars in a water bath. Soon the quick pickles they made at home and stored in the fridge became shelf stable and went home with friends and family.
Yuli’s grandparents' vegetable garden was where they learned to keep a kitchen scrap going for years. Aaron’s family held the key to long held practices of keeping seeds year after year, generation after generation, brought over from Japan by families now living all over Canada.
Little Yuli and their opa, Roland, in the vegetable garden.
Food and flavour inspirations include:
Kwan Jeong
Sohla El-Waylly
Delphine & Diane J. Hirasuna
David Chang
Corey Lee
Ginette Mathoit
Chao Yang Buwei
Magnus Nilsson
Namiko Hirasawa Chen
Kim Kwang-sook aka Maangchi
& all the volunteers in the kitchen at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto and the garden of Tonari Gumi in Vancouver.
your truly, yuli & aaron marubashi-scheidt
