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| And the Japanese word for peach is -- momo! And I make tolerably good-looking stylized peaches, if I do say so myself. |
Tadaaaa! I'm early this time! I'm even sort of seasonal again! How's this? Well, March is a month associated with peach blossoms -- and therefore the topics of this post is a good, seasonally relevant one to talk about!
So, as you know, people put peaches/peach flavoring in practically every type of dessert or drink known to man, from pie, yogurt, ice cream, candy, sweet tea, soda pop, juice drinks, scones and cakes/quick breads to more healthy options such as fruit salads (probably, though I've never seen it myself) and smoothies. (Congratulations, you made it to the end of the list!) They even put it in salsa, which is more or less where I draw the peach appreciation line, myself.
Meanwhile in Japan (muwahahaha! ahem), among the various varieties and options of peach themed comestibles, there's also a summer dessert called 白桃ゼリー or hakutō zerī. Which in English means (so far as I understand it) "white peach jelly".
The Background: White Peaches
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| Peaches: also in white. |
You, like me, probably don't connect peaches with Japan. At all. In fact, if you've been looking around at Japan, one of those things you probably have heard (or will hear soon enough) about Japan is that fresh fruit costs. And that, in fact, having fresh fruit requires a certain level of income to acquire regularly, perhaps about what a well-cornered stock market would get you.
The truth of the matter is, it's not just Hokkaido that's known for its produce! There are whole prefectures known for growing produce. One such prefecture is Okayama Prefecture (kanji as so: 岡山県), the "Land of Sunshine" which is known for peaches and grapes -- it's the prefecture where half of Japan's peaches are grown. (Kinda seems like a cross between Georgia and Florida).
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| Brought to you by countless dedicated cartographers and Wikipedia (checked with Google Maps). Label, arrow and background art by me and MS Paint. |
In particular, to sorta kinda be precise, Okayama Prefecture is known for the hakutō or white peach (They're not white really, from the pics I've seen -- they're more a pale yellow, with some red blush). From what it looks like, hakutō is a term for any type of Japanese white peach grown in Okayama (though I bet people use it in general too.)
The very first type of hakutō came from Chinese immigrant peaches, brought over during the Meiji period -- apparently, the Chinese cling (or Shanhai Suimitsu). Some of the different types I've come across in my internet agricultural travels include the shimizu hakutō, Okayama yume hakutō (hmm, the "Okayama dream white peach"),the sakigake hakutō. The shimisu hakuō is the most well-known.
...And, uh, well that's all I have to say about that for now. ;)
Hakutō Zerī
But it's not just the various races of peach that we're talkin' 'bout t'day. (Apostrophes -- now for all your phonetically expressed dialectical inflection needs!) No, today the ultimate point of the article is this: hakutō jelly -- aka white peach jello. To introduce you to how a commercial hakutō zerī looks, here's an ad spot/micro tour for a company that makes hakutō zerī with the shimizu hakutō:
This URL has a recipe in Japanese for ... pickled(?) hakutō zerī. With the mixed blessing that is Google Translate as my aid (again), it looks like the directions say to make a syrup with chopped white peaches, water and sugar (plus some lemon). After that there's some directions involving something that seems kinda like gelatin, but isn't quite : ゼリーの素 -- I think it might be jello mix. (If it is jello mix, it seems a bit of a cheat, but I suppose it adds flavor, like adding onion powder to chili with onions already in it). I assume some kind of acid is involved to to the fact "pickled" aspect of it...
Anyway, the uploader in the videos below (don't worry, they're super short) uses this method:
And part two:
Looks like he could have benefited from a pinch of agar or the like, but I bet it tasted pretty good all the same.
Meanwhile, this book has a recipe in English what seems like it's pretty much hakutō zerī, and it's similar to the above recipe, though it uses certain other ingredients, and doesn't use prepackaged jello. (If you can't find it in the preview (Google Books is like that sometimes), try a different browser, that works for me.)
Much as I'd like to have been able to write about the history and cultural use of this dessert, it just sort of seems to... be. I haven't found anything about it's origin or rise in popularity 'n all that... Ah well, here's to diversity!
An Extraneous Video I Looked At
A lot of videos that came up on YouTube for hakutō zerī were unboxing/tasting type videos. The video you're gonna come across in a few sentences is one of 'em. It's a bit slow paced/quiet (it's like he's doing an ASMR video or something), here's this un-boxing of an undeniably very fancily wrapped hakutō (Like the last video, don't know what all he's sayin', so just an fyi to all you speakers and learners of the language):
So anyway, all in all, white peach jelly probably isn't really considered particularly that different and/or special from yellow peach jelly. Um, well, to wrap things up I guess I'll finish with one last fact on peaches which says that for a while white peaches were the peach of choice in Japan, not yellow, but that's been changing. (I have no official time line of this, you'll just have to trust my vague assertations). See y'all later!
References:
"The peach and the poet know/Under the chill the glow,/And the token of golden days!" -- Bayard Taylor from Peach Blossom (Hooray for search engines!)
Okayama Prefecture Web Site: モモの新品種 ‘さきがけはくとう’ 日原 誠介・藤井 雄一郎・笹邊 幸男* A New Peach Cultivar ʻSakigake hakutoʼ Seisuke Hihara, Yuichiro Fujii and Yukio Sasabe
J-Stage: "White Peach in Okayama prefecture, Distinctive development and the endeavors for the best quality"; Yuichiro Fuji
"Shunju: New Japanese Cuisine;" Takashi Sugimoto, Marcia Iwatate; 2002
"The Peach: Botany, Production and Uses": Desmone R. Layne, Daniele Bassi (editors); 2008
Okayama University: Okayama Travelogue: Okayama Hakuto-the sweet and fragrant peach grown in ‘Land of Sunshine’
