Yubeshi

A famous food in Ishikawa Prefecture's Noto Peninsula as well as the Tōhoku region, and looking like trail food,  here's today's topic: yubeshi or 柚餅子 --  that's "yuzu", "mochi" and "child", respectively. Two of -- well I guess all three really, though the third's a bit of a stretch -- these kanji give massive hints about what yubeshi is. 

For geographical-ness though here's some pictures of Ishikawa Prefecture and the Tōhoku region.

The dark part's the Tōhoku
region. From Wikimedia (again, checked
by the internet).

Looks kinda like a sock puppet dunnit?
At least part of the stick-y out-y
bit's the Noto Peninsula.
(From Wikimedia, checked by the internet).

So anyways, when you see a picture of yubeshi served up, your first impression may very well be that it began life as a (hopeful) attempt at vegan jerky. But it's not! It's a(n) (obviously) yuzu flavored rice and/or miso dumpling that takes a good while to prepare, and it can have other stuff too, depending on the recipe. 

As for culture... Hmm, it's a cold-weather food associated with rural areas. (Lemme tell you, it just looks like something created for enduring hard times -- but I like lemony things, so for all I know I'd like it). It's also popular at New Years. 

With a sharp sudden turn in focus, and without out further ado, let's begin what's basically the second intro, the Yuzu Aside! (Which you can skip, and probably will, if you're just in it for the yubeshi).

Yuzu Aside

For those who previously were completely ignorant of the yuzu's existence and to round out our knowledge of the yubeshi, let's take a moment to consider the yuzu or 柚子 (though I've seen it just as 柚. If there's a nuance, no place I've read (that I could understand okay) has mentioned it.)

Botanists, and other science types probably, have been known to call this fruit Citrus junos. Like limes and lemons and such, yuzu are used in cooking -- for one thing, it's the fruit ponzu makers put in their ponzu -- unless it's a company that doesn't want to use something that's probably more expensive or has tariffs or something... they use lemon, from what I understand, which I think is basically what people who can't get yuzu use anyway. 

Pic of a yuzu I nabbed from the Wikipedia. (It had a
 mandarin too, but I edited it out. The shadow's on it's right is from
the mandarin). Seems to match the other pics I've seen -- a yellow
orange that looks like it's been left in the fruit bowl a bit too long.

Types

Getting back to yubeshi, it would appear that there're several types (or more... and not everyone says they're are types. *Shrugs* One book I found says two is the number, so for now we'll go with that. I mean, it's from 1976 and is a little confusing, but it's the most comprehensive definition I've got right now that I can read without guessing every other word.)

One type has a miso mix. You can use it as a party snack-y type thing (aka hors d'oeuvres -- or appetizer, if you're at a restaurant)  as a topper for foods, sliced.

The other type is composed of a mochi mix (looks like soy sauce, a sweet syrup (dunno which type) or at least some type of sweetener and glutinous rice). It's is supposed to be spicy and sweet but not super strong tasting. You use it as a snack/hors doeuvre/appetizer or as a candy.

Walnut yubeshi -- which is yubeshi with walnuts in -- seems to be a thing. Here's a (Japanese language) recipe video (I don't know what the song is about, but it sounds exciting. Oh, and walnut in Japanese is kurumi, and if you want to spell it in kanji, this is it: 胡桃).

Procedure

The general procedure for making them is this: either you cut your yuzus either in half or just part of the top end (got a bit of contradiction there) --  then you can scoop out the innards. (You know in Belize, they make jack o'lanterns out of grapefruits as a Día de los Muertos decoration. True story.) Once they're hollowed out, fill 'em with your yubeshi mix, apply steam and hang your filled yuzu molds up in a tree to dry. (Or, in the case of the videos I'm going to introduce below, in a commercial drier). This will take a good while -- but once their done, pop 'em out of their rinds like those little red cheeses in the dairy section and voila! A nice crop of yubeshi, ready to be sliced up thin and served. 

The point of using yuzu is so that the mix gets that yuzu taste... I haven't looked at people's personal recipes much, but I found a quick version for Yubeshi in Google Books where you just grate yuzu peel straight into your mix and put your yubeshi your fridge to chill for a few days.

Explanatory-ish Videos

Here's  video (part 1 of 2) that I don't understand. But it's got a dramatic-y cinematic Jurassic Park meets Hallmark/Disney Channel type feel, which might be enough to help carry you along to the end. (It's a yubeshi/yuzu growing tourist place promotional video, from what I do understand).

And because sometimes I'm filled with civic mindedness, below this sentence you will find part two. ;) 

Post-Script PSA

Oh, and just an FYI: do not search for yubeshi on the Amazon site for English speakers. Strange as it may sound, when I did that, there was nothing on the rice cake stuffed into a fruit rind and steamed then dried. 

No, what I did find was anime posters. Lots and lots of (somewhat suggestive) anime posters -- at least some of which were for an anime called Yubeshi (so props to the Amazon search box for accuracy). I gave up after several pages, and instead (after failing to find much on Google Shopping) went to the Japanese Amazon, where I struck some pay-dirt -- actual yubeshi products! Okay, this is starting to sound like an ad for Amazon, so I'd better stop. 

Ta!

References:

Hooray for search engines and the internet! 

"Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan; Eric Rath; 2010

"The Illustrated Cook's Book of Ingredients"; 2010

"The Book of Miso"; William Shurtleff, Akiko Aoyagi"; 1976

"A Dictionary of Japanese Food: Ingredients & Culture"; Richard Hosking; 1995

"和英：日本の文化・観光・歴史辞典" ("A Japanese-English Dictionary of Culture, Tourism and History of Japan"); 山口百々男, Steven Bates; 2014

"Chado: The Way of Tea"; Sanmi Sasaki, (translated by ‎Shaun McCabe, ‎Satoko Iwasaki); 2002    This one doesn't actually let you see the book, but if you scroll down the page to the "Other Editions" section, you get a limited preview of the 1997 version... which won't let me see anything on yubeshi. Yeah, it's a little convoluted. Oh wells, I tried!

Kusamochi

Today is the fourth day (my time) of the Chinese (lunar) new year, a period of festivites lasting two weeks and one day. Therefore, I suppose it would be fitting and in the moment to write about, oh, say, kagami mochi, shiruko, hastumode, kadomatsu or ozōni/osechi ryori -- or even all of them at once, plus all the other interesting Japanese New Year's traditions. Which I kind of just have, so there we go, obligatory New Year's blogging completed. You can all go home now -- go on, shoo. Go 'way now, I means it!




Just kidding!

Thoday' topic is kusa mochi(space optional), aka 草餅, which people also call yomogi mochi, aka 蓬餅. You may notice that the second kanji for both words is mochi. The first kanji of kusa mochi though, means grass, and the first kanji of the second word is mugwort. You can basically see where this is all going/has already ended up, right? Mochi flavored (and colored green) with mugwort (though it doesn't strictly have to be mugwort -- more on that in a bit). Sounds tasty, dunnit? 


Yeah, to me it still sounds like a health food -- but since I've got exactly zero experience with mugwort as a flavor, even though it sounds  kinda meh, it might be good for all I know. So don't let my confidence and authoritative position as a producer of fine and timeless information products influence you in the least -- and if you've tried it, don't hesitate to say. (Yeah, I am getting this social media guru thing down, for sho'!)

First, a brief aside about mochi, which I suppose I ought to have put earlier on in this post but didn't. (Those with intermediate mochi knowledge will understandably and undoubtedly skip the next paragraph. And the one right below it). 

In Japan, they've got their own style of rice, and a variety of that has more starch. This second type is steamed and pounded -- traditionally with giant wood mallets and a giant wood pestle, but they also (blessedly) have machines for it these days. (Still, I suppose the hammerer and mochi flipper team can be a bit more of a draw at fairs and public events and suchlike.)

Mochi can be and is often colored and/or flavored and/or wrapped around something -- and/or mixed with tons of preserving chemicals before left to sit on store shelves. There's a lot of ways its used as an ingredient (and as a food-like substance with the proper additives) for both desserts and otherwise.

(Hm, that wasn't such a short aside. Ah wells...)

Here's a video of the hammerer and mochi flipping team showing of their skills making kusamochi:

Sort of looks like they're beating up on that one ghost from Ghostbusters, doesn't it?

Getting back on track: the delightful East Asian perennial with the charming scientific name of Artemisia princeps -- aka yomogi. People in East Asia  have a tradition of using it for feminine complaints, but that's not all it's used for. Plug yomogi into a general shopping site like Amazon or whatever, and you'll see a very random assortment of products, and the usual stuff like mochi, powdered yomogi and seeds for growing your own yomogis -- we're talking soap, some kind of foot pads/wipes, facial masks, even some kind of pelvic corrective hot water bottle cushion for women in "yomogi". It's definitely part of the herbal health scene, it looks, as it's used to put the moxa in moxibustion.

Unusual and slightly surprising uses aside, apparently people use it to flavor things. Young leaves (harvested in spring and blanched), are put in foods (like soup, dango, o-hitashi and rice). 

If you can't get mugwort for your kusa mochi, that's okay, because tradition allows for other grasses like it that you can sub. (I don't know what those grasses are, but they're out there.) 

Aight, now for some history on this thing, so you'll feel all awesome and knowledgeable should you come across it and/or be eatin' it. 

Waaay back in the Heian period, like the first part of it, there was this one day, the third day of the third month. This day was then known as the infamous sounding Day of the Snake. On it, people in Japan ate kusamochi -- though their kusamochi used cudweed (gogyō or 御形), known alternately by the name/phrase "mother child grass" (hahakogusa or 母子草). (For any botany enthusiasts out there, the scientific name for this one is Gnaphalium affine). 

The reason for the kusamochi on the Day of the Snake, was because the Day of the Snake was a time to get rid of pollution. Spring greens, now in rice cake form!

This tradition came about because hahakogusa had a tradition in China: it was thought that it had such a powerful smell that it gave evil a great big smack on the olfactory receptors, keeping it well away from people. (They used other plants tradition also was a thing in Japan for a time -- and kind of still is).

But wait, I hear you say, isn't the third day of the third month Girls' Day/Hina Matsuri? Yep. The Girls' Day you read of today came out of the Day of the Snake -- the switch happened in the Edo period. In spite of all the emphasis on the dolls, Girls' Day is still a day of purification.

So on to modern day uses. Kusa mochi still is used for Hina Matsuri, though it's not the only official sweet of the day (at least one that I know of is hishi mochi -- diamond shaped mochi that has three layers: pink, white and green). It's also a dessert just generally associated with spring -- people use it in situations where they want to be historical and seasonal (like in kaiseki or a Girls' Day tea ceremony). 

As for ways people serve kusa mochi up, I've seen it made plain as well as kusamochi a la daifuku (filled with anko)... Curiously, one book, which was about tea ceremonies, said you're supposed to shape your kusamochi into a hat. That's the only place that I've happened across that's mentioned this hat, that I know. Sounds interesting, though. However they look, I bet they'd make a really different St. Patrick's Day dish, for sure!

References:
Happy year of the rooster! (Next year's the year of the dog, starting Febuary 16th -- pass it on!)

"Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts"; Haruo Shirane; 2012

"Kaiseki: The Exquisite Cuisine of Kyoto's Kikunoi Restaurant"; Yoshihiro Murata; 2006

"Chado the Way of Tea: A Japanese Tea Master's Almanac"; Sasaki Sanmi; 2002

"Lake Biwa: Interactions between Nature and People". Hiroya Kawanabe, Machiko Nishino, Masayoshi Maehata (editors); 2012

NCBI PMC: "The combination of Artemisia princeps Pamp, Leonurus japonicas Houtt, and Gardenia jasminoides Ellis fruit attenuates the exacerbation of energy, lipid, and glucose by increasing hepatic PGC-1α expression in estrogen-deficient rats"; Hye Jeong Yang, Min Jung Kim, Dae Young Kwon, Bo Reum Moon, A. Reum Kim, Suna Kang, and Sunmin Park; 2016

"A Dictionary of Japanese Food: Ingredients and Culture"; Richard Hosking; 1995

Wappani

Your first clue for finding out what wappani is.
Truly, I am the MS Paint artist of the age!

Type  "wappani" into Google and you will find all manner of highly informative information -- on a native American tribe called the Wappinger. (They lived from Manhattan through Poughkeepsie, by the way. They merged with other native peoples after they and the Dutch spent some time beating the tar out of each other.)

But wappani -- no matter what your search engine may try to tell you -- has nothing to do with North American peoples, (though when you know what it is, you can't help but think it ought to be).

It's actually a Japanese dish, and it's spelled like this わっぱ煮. You'll find it's associated with the island of Awashima (kanji thusly: 粟島), part of Niigata Prefecture (aka Niigata ken or 新潟県).

And now, ¡te presento una mapa con la isla de Awashima! (Yes, I know this isn't Things on Latin America/Spain. I just don't get a lot of opportunities to show off my beginner's Spanish. Can't fault me that much, can you? ;) )







So, our geographical context is in place. Time to tell you what wappani is. It is, more or less, this:

First, take a special flat-bottomed bowl made of cedar (aka the wappa, aka わっぱ . You have no idea how much I want to think up a wappa/Whopper joke right now). Put your soup ingredients in it, including things like miso, onion and cooked fish.

Next, locate a few (and this is important) heat-resistant rocks (we're talking basalt (aka genbugan/玄武岩) here. Don't nobody wanna dodge kitchen shrapnel, 's all I'm sayin'.) Heat them in a well made fire of some kind until they're so hot that they scare you. Pour hot water into your bowl.

Take up your pair of fire resistant tongs, pick up one of your hot rocks, dip it in a conveniently placed bowl of water, and insert it into your wappa. If you've done it right, the water will instantly begin (and continue for a short time) to boil extremely well -- the 煮 part of wappani.

When it stops boiling as much, repeat the rock dipping and inserting process, until you are satisfied. (I actually don't know why the people in the videos I looked at put new hot rocks in the wappa. The soup looked pretty heated up to me with just the first rock. Trade secrets, perhaps, or unobservant blogger.)

Voila, wappani! Basically a ancient/tribal/survivalist version of making your own phyllo/puff pastry/lutefisk. In a way needlessly complicated, but interesting, kind of impressive and possibly worth doing one time, if you're in the mood for it.

Here's one of the videos I looked at:

A variation on the heating process involves putting the rock in before the water, and adding in more than one rock, as you can see in this video:

I'm sure the ancient Awashima inhabitants also had their fine wire strainers to get the foam off the top of the bowls. ;)

And there's more. The video below (dated May 2010) shows what looks like some kind of first annual festival. Be warned: lots of Japanese folksy (and even at one point jazz/bluesy) music  and lots of people being silly for the camera -- dancing, singing, saying that the wappani is delicious ("umai!" and "uma'!"), and having exaggerated reactions of bliss while eating it. (Of course, if wappani takes a long time to make, they may have just been really hungry.) Those feeling dignified and/or find their eyes (and soul) twitching at the sound of goofy or twangy music, this may be a little hard to watch.

 Might be fun to go to though. ;)

References:

From Wappinger to wappani.

The Free Dictionary: Wappinger

NHK: みちしる:粟島のわっぱ煮漁師たちの豪快な郷土料理 <-- Had to guess out a way to put the title together on this one, just an FYI to the bibliographers out there.

粟島浦村: 粟島食の特産品


(Only three this time, amazing!) Also, the middle reference has an interesting video that I would have liked to embed here, but alas.)

Shōbu, Hanashōbu, Ayame... or Something

Those of you who are up on Japanese flower/month seasonality know that this is waaaay out of sync. But hopefully you like it and don't feel too edutained. 



Observe this picture a moment.

Kinda pretty, isn't it?  I came across it in the Library of Congress's Flickr account (they've got a lot of old images there, you should check it out).

Its title is Horikiri no Hanashōbu or "Irises at Horikiri". It's -- and I have no idea why this is-- either number 56 or number 64 of the Utagawa Hiroshige's  One Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo (Meisho Edo Hyakkei or 名所江戸百景).

(You might already know that Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858) was a famous woodblock artist. But if you didn't, now you do).

Strangely, I've looked at a couple different museums' copies of this print, and their color schemes tend to look different from the above... But that's a side trip of a side trip, when what I'm really trying to do is lead into today's topic: irises.

Though you don't hear about it (or at least I hadn't), irises were (and still are) a thing in Japan. There's stuff on them in centuries-old gardening manuals. And they were a popular (and therefore profitable) plant to grow there a while back. Not to mention the old gardens either partly or totally dedicated to irises.

For now, I'm going to focus on iris-related botany and traditions, and maybe I'll add in some more history as time goes on.


Names and Species
So let us ask ourselves, what makes the Japanese iris or hanashōbu  (花菖蒲)? Or should we say shōbu (菖蒲) instead? Or perhaps the name is ayame? ...'Scuse me a moment *breathes into paper bag for half a minute*.

Okay, I'll try to explain now.

When first trying to find a botanical definition for the "Japanese iris" (get ready for some Linnaeus-style names), I (big surprise) ran into different people saying different things. Looking again (it had been a while since I last worked on this post), I've discovered a list of irises plus their Japanese names on a personal page hosted by the University of Vermont. Here's a list of irises that I found there (the "I." is short for "Iris"):

I. sanguinea = ayame 

I. ensata = hanashōbu 

I. laevigata = kakitsubata 

I. japonica = shaga 

I. pseudacorus = ki shōbu

Of course this same list says that just plain shōbu means Acorus calamus, aka the sweet flag/calamus/sweet calamus... though a different place says an (old) name for calamus is ayame. Then there's  this book that says that Acorus calamus (variant asiaticus) is the shōbu, also known as ayame. Which various sites agree with when it comes to traditions that use irises.

Thought I'd put some iris pics
in. This one I think's supposed
to be I. pseudacorus. From
NYPL Digital Commons.

But wait, here's another explanation that goes like this: ayame/hana-ayame is an old-time word for iris, while shōbu  is a shortening of hanashōbu -- though you might see the latter referenced as sweet flag.

And then, rising out of the mist to join the unholy horde of maniacally disparate definitions, comes yet another one, more insidious than the last. Agreeing with the Vermont page, that same aforementioned book says hanashōbu applies to I. ensata, and also includes what it calls the I. ensata's "descendants". (I assume that means hybrids or crossbred species?) Oh, and ayame is also another (old) name for I. sanguinea, by the way. But wait, there's still more.

When looking up hanafuda in the online video world, I've seen a vlog and a Japanese language video on the koi-koi style that both say the name's ayame or shōbu. (Nargh......)

Like something the dinosaurs
would've walked by (and probably
stepped on), it's: the sweet flag.
The dotted oblong thing on the
left is the "flower". 

And then, there's this one book that says ayame and hanashōbu  are both words for I. ensata -- which it says in English is called the Japanese iris, Japanese water iris and Kaempfer's ris. (Double, no, triple nargh....)

Of course, my Japanese-English dictionary (published by Langenscheidt) simply said the name for iris was 'ayame', but I've grown not to trust it that much, so who knows what the truth is -- apparently, nobody does. At all. Probably depends on what your family/friends use.


One really does start to wonder just how set these definitions are...  *gives a jaded yet dispassionate glare into the middle distance*

Sigh....



Traditions
Ignoring the fact that the science of botany must be evidence that not all potentialities completely collapse when a decision is made, let's talk about some of the cultural stuff.

You'll find sites that say that the iris is associated with the 5th lunar month, or May these days, because it's the time when irises (I assume all kinds) bloom (though you'll also see them in June), and is considered a symbol of summer.

In connection to this, you'll see the iris (though not the sweet flag, but one with petals) as one of the suits in a hanafuda deck, which uses a flower/plant theme for each of its twelve suits (one for each month, see?).

Speaking of seasonality, irises are supposed to be an old way to tell when to put your rice seedlings into the fields. A different sort of flower clock, eh?

Though Japan does have Cinco de Mayo festivals, May 5th over there means tango no sekku (端午の節句), which ofttimes people translate as Boy's Day (or even its new name, Children's Day), though it sure doesn't look like the kanji for that to me. But it has other names too: shōbu no sekku (菖蒲の節句 or Iris Festival) and shōbu no hi (菖蒲の日 or  Iris Day). I've even seen the day called (in English, at least) the "sweet flag festival" -- which adds to the argument that Acorus calamus is the actual flower for the occasion.

So, Tango no Sekku iris sweet flag traditions. There's a tradition of putting sweet flag leaves in the bath water to keep from getting sick or make evil spirits stay away (I'm sensing a possible case of semantics here). Apparently you can even find onsens (bath houses) that do this with their baths. This iris bath even has a name, shōbu-yu or菖蒲湯 -- which means "sweet flag hot water".

Yet another tradition I read about says that way back when, irises were thought to stop fires, and on tango no sekku some places in the countryside put up iris leaves on the outside of their houses. (I wonder if they really just used sweet flag for this or others...hmm... that's just me still not having a solid idea about the whole thing though.)

Oh, and let's not forget 菖蒲酒 which I want to say ought to be spelled shōbuzake, but the source I found didn't use the macron so yeah.... It's iris-flavored sake, which sounds absolutely terrible to me, but then again most alcohol I've ever tried just tastes like clarified rot anyway. The point of shōbuzake is the same as the other traditions, to protect you from evil. It certainly would kill some germs at least. And probably some taste buds too.

Iris Viewing
Want to know where some iris gardens in Japan are? You've come to the right header! One of the iris gardens still out there today is at the Meiji Imperial Shrine (Meiji Jingū or 明治神宮). But you can also go to public gardens that have iris viewing festivals.

Like the one in northern Kyushu at the Ishibashi Cultural Center (石橋美術館) in Fukuoka Prefecture  -- this year's festival started May 28th and went until June 19th.

Or you could go to Katsushika Ward's Iris Festival, which is held at two parks. One is Misumoto Park (Mizumoto Kōen 水元公園), which has an iris garden in it. The other park is  Horikiri Hanashōbu (堀切菖蒲園) -- yep, that Horikiri.

Speaking of which, here's an old photo of it from the NYPL Digital Commons:

Then there's the iris festival of Kameyama (亀山) in Mie Prefecture. In spite of the (smidgen of) research I put into finding what they're doing for future festivals, I haven't found anything. But I do know they held their 18th iris festival on June 14th last year. For a greater sense of place and all that, here's a description from the pdf:

"Date and Time: June 14 (Sun), 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. (The festival will be held even if it rains.) Place: Iris field in Kameyama Park (Kameyama Kōen Shōbuen) Features: Instruction of growing irises (sale of irises), stalls (Yakisoba, Mitarashi, popcorn, cotton candy, Frankfurt sausages, rolled sushi, Misoyaki Udon, Japanese and western confectionery, Aji-gohan, various beverages, local products, handicrafts produced by physically disabled people), outdoor Japanese tea ceremony, photo contest, painting contest (for elementary school students or younger), balloon art and more…" 

Of course, if you want to stay in a predominantly English speaking country, there are iris festivals in the U.S., like in Sumter, North Carolina and Dresden, Tennessee. Have fun!

References:
Cuz it's all so awesome, everyone should be able to read them.

Kurume Bureau of Tourism and International Exchange: Kurume, A City of Hospitality: Iris Festival

"CRC World Dictionary of Plant Names: Common Names, Scientific Names, Eponyms, Synonyms, and Etymology", Volume 2; Umberto Quattrocchi; 2000

University of Virginia Library: Japanese Haiku a Topical Ditionary: Brief Entries: natsu: gyōji, Summer: Observances

Princeton University: Cotsen Children's Library: "Japan's "Last Living Ninja" Infiltrates the Cotsen Children's Library in "The Art of Ninjutsu: Tiger Scroll""; Tara McGowan; May 2, 2016

"Collecting Japanese Antiques"; Alistair Seton; 2004

Cross Currents: Boys' Day, Children's Day, or Tango no Sekku (May 5)

Portland Art Museum: Asian Art Council  <<< See, this version of the Hiroshige's work is so different from the one here!

Kameyama News, No. 74; May 2015

University of Vermont: Perry's Perennial Pages: Perennial Plant Names: Japanese Common Names, alphabetic by genus

"Japanese Floral Calendar"; Ernest W. Clement, M.A.; 1904 <<< A free Google e-book, by the way.

City of Dresden, Tennessee

"The Japanese Iris"; Currier McEwen; 1990

City of Sumter

"The Lure of the Japanese Garden"; Alison Main, Newell Platten; 2002

College of Policy Science, Ritsumeikan University: Enjoy Fushimi Home of Sake Breweries



U.S. National Plant Germplasm System: Taxon: Acorus calamus L.

Shinkokinshū: New Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern"; Laurel Rasplica Rodd (translator and introducer); 2015

Image References:
For the photographically inclined (and my own protection).

Rare Book Division, The New York Public Library. "Iris pseudocorus" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dd-ef64-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "Horikiri, Iris Flower Garden at Tokio" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-c927-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database / Britton, N.L., and A. Brown. 1913. An illustrated flora of the northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions. 3 vols. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. Vol. 1: 446.

which I got from here:

USDA, NRCS. 2016. The PLANTS Database (http://plants.usda.gov, 31 October 2016). National Plant Data Team, Greensboro, NC 27401-4901 USA.

Mizu Yōkan

Consarn it, I could've sworn I did a September post... alright, two posts for October, it is! (Which, incidentally, is squirrel awareness month. Strange but true. )

Behold, three kanji, progressing in complexity until you have to enlarge your screen to read the last one: 水羊羹.  You might see this mysterious word spelled in other, simpler ways, like 水ようかん. The transliteration is, with or without the space, mizu yōkan or mizu  yokan for the macron disinclined/challenged/lazy. Whichever way you spell it (or draw it, I'm not always sure which verb to use), the word only means one thing. Jello. More or less.


Ingredients

But it's not just any kind of jello -- it's vegan jello, with a very "East Asian" flavor of red bean paste (aka anko, which you can draw/spell 餡子).

The gelatin is the magical, sets-at-room-temperature agar-agar, or to use the Japanese name, kanten (whose kanji looks like this: 寒天 -- wait, that looks like "cold heaven"...well, there's something to look into.).

The other ingredient is water... and sugar, depending on the recipe. Looks like adding chestnuts is allowed, but they're not absolutely necessary, and I think that might actually be kuri yokan.

After poured into a pan with corners, chilled (yes, chilled, there is a reason, just keep reading) and set, it's cut into squares or rectangular cuboids/bars (at least that's what I've seen) and looks like this lovely drawing I whipped together in MS Paint:

I actually only managed to get the little dessert pitchfork's angles right on accident. Yeah, the sky's a little big, but oh well. Stare at it long enough and you can start to see the darker shade I used for the edges.


Classification and History


Mizu yōkan is actually a sub-variety of the dessert yōkan or 羊羹 -- its name means "water yōkan '. (It looks like there are two other versions, neri yōkan or 練り羊羹, which uses more anko, and mushi yōkan or 蒸し羊羹. The only specific thing I know about mushi yōkan is that it's steamed.)

It has a history of the "centuries old" variety (yōkan's ancestor was a meat sub from China first eaten in Japan by the country's Zen monk community), but I'll save the details for a general yōkan post, which this one was turning into, before I managed to put a stop to it, unlike this sentence.

There is of course, a seasonal guideline for eating mizu yōkan. You're supposed to eat it when it's summer outside. However, in a recipe video by Ochikeron (which I've put a little below this in the Recipes section), she adds a little to this: in Fukui prefecture, there's a tradition of eating it when the weather's cold.

For those among us (myself included)
who had no idea where it was.

Recipes

Below are some recipe videos that I looked at. The first, from Cooking with Dog, looks unusual and pretty because they used little half-spheres as molds. But the recipe said you need to keep it refrigerated, so's I thought to myself I gotta keep looking. (I wonder if refrigeration might be necessary for any mizu yōkan, but other videos don't mention it so... hmm.)

The second one is from Ochikeron, which is the recipe I wrote down to make sometime.

Here's one from Just One Cookbook. Its doesn't have voiced narration, if you prefer your tutorials with writing. Also, the knife the person uses looks like it was made with the mokume gane technique (which uses several metals to make resulting item look like wood -- kinda cool, right?)

Finally, here's a spectacularly artistic one by decocookie, which also doesn't use spoken narration. It uses edible glitter and fruit rinds to make "fireworks" on top.

For recipes, I went for videos. Among the different ones that popped up on the first page of the YouTube search results, there was a mizu yōkan video that uses bamboo as the mold, making mizu yōkan tubes! (And looking kind of like pralines, but I'm pretty sure you couldn't eat the "shell" and  the inside would taste nothing like the filling). I haven't looked at it, so you'll just have to go see them for yourself. ;)

Of course, if you want something  super "official", there's the recipe from the website for Yamaguchi Prefecture (clicky). It calls for topping the mizu yōkan with arare mochi (aka toasted mochi), which I only heard of after finding that recipe. (Hurray for research adventures!)

Cooking Tips
Amongst the various works discovered while rushing around on the 1st to get a post put together, there is one in particular that I wish to point out. The title? Cooking Innovations: Using Hydrocolloids for Thickening, Gelling, and Emulsification. Yeah, science cooking! Other than a recipe for both mizu yōkan and anko, it had some tips (well, the anko recipe was a tip, actually...) Here are the tips it had:

First, you might be tempted to go outside the rules a bit and add your sugar first, but don't! Your kanten won't dissolve then, and you'll never get your red bean jello to set.

Another caveat (gasp!): make sure you have your mizu yōkan solidify in someplace very cool (aka the refrigerator or outside, if you're in Fukui Prefecture ;) ). If you don't you'll get anko on the bottom and kanten on the top. (That actually sounds kind of neat to me, though I don't know what would happen when you tried to serve it.)

A third tip, which I was going to mention myself, if no one else did (but probably everyone does) was this: kanten comes in more than one form. Get the powder form, because if you get, say, the stick form, you're gonna need to soak it first. I don't even know what you need to do if you get the thread form.

It's titled,
"Well, I Thought I'd At Least Try It -- You Want It?".

References:
Fellow dessert-ologists, I give you my sources!

"Cooking Innovations: Using Hydrocolloids for Thickening, Gelling, and Emulsification"; Amos Nussinovitch, Madoka Hirashima"; 2014

"Shunju: New Japanese Cuisine"; 2006

"1000 + Indigenous Tasty Cuisine of Twenty-three Asian Countries with Food for Thought (Purchase this Book and Help Feed Hungry Children!)"; Dr. Lawrence Wheeler, Dr Beatrice Batnag Donofrio; 2009

"和英日本の文化・観光・歴史辞典 A Japanese English Dictionary of Culture, Tourism and History of Japan"; 山口百々男, Steven Bates; 2010

"Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan"; Eric Rath; 2010

All gone!

Soba Meshi

Mercy, don't I just keep waiting til the last minute. Anyway, here's a map of Japan. Look for Kobe:

See it? Let's take a closer look using this prefecture map (Kobe's in the indigo section, in number 28 -- 兵庫県 or Hyōgo-ken):

Closer...(It's the dark green part):

And even closer!

Okaay, so the last one's a little old. But how often do you get to see a vintage, color postcard of a Japanese city?

Geography slide show aside, what do you think when you hear Kobe? With me its earthquakes. Probably some of you think either that or cow meat, or both. Of course there's a lot more going on there. Like soba meshi (or そば飯), which can also be spelled sans spacebar.

Now, if you have any exposure to Japanese, you might guess that soba meshi is some sort of rice and noodle dish, probably using soba noodles. You might just maybe even wonder if it's a variation on the theme of yakisoba, which would be the more accurate guess.


Origin Stories
Soba meshi's origins are, as has been so terribly common, not clear. One story sets the stage at 50 years ago, in an unregarded noodle shop on the edge of the city. The proprietors of the shop were bored out of their skulls, so they decided to get a little experimental in the kitchen, frying up a mix of noodles and rice. They tried selling it to people, and it was a hit.

But the Hyogo Tourism Guide has it that an okonomiyaki chef created it upon a request by a customer. A Blogger blog titled Hyogo Tourism TID Blog Go! Go! Hyogo says that it was invented by women factory workers who went to okonomiyaki restaurants, and used the teppan grills there to mix rice they'd brought with them with Worcestershire sauce and Chinese style wheat noodles.

It's a good thing I don't have one of those sand-filled stress balls, or I'd probably end up like Dilbert, asking for a new kybard.

Whatever the specifics, soba meshi is a food that Kobe's known for. One book (it's in the References -- and don't worry, you can't miss it), even called it "Kobe soul food". (And the shop's still there, by the way. Dunno the name of it, but it's there.)

Ingredients
The list of ingredients for classic soba meshi is cabbage, onion, yakisoba noodles/chukamen (chopped), rice, and (we all might have guessed) cow meat. Though you'll also see other types, including soba meshi that's just rice and noodles fried together.  And it looks like you use yakisoba sauce as well, though apparently it's not strictly necessary. I've seen people use a powder form of yakisoba flavoring, and at least one recipe that didn't seem to use either, though I only briefly looked at it.

 Now, I have been fortunate to go to an Asian food market for the last couple of weeks, and on one trip got a bottle of Otafuku brand yakisoba sauce. (I've seen a book and a video use it, so I guess I bought a good pick for the "right" flavor. Yay!) Here's what the ingredients list says:

Vinegar, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Fruits and Vegetables (Tomato, Onion, Apple, Carrot, Peach, Date, Orange, Garlic), Water, Sugar, Hydrolized Soy Protein, Soy Sauce, Salt, Modified Food Starch, Spices, Caramel Coloring, Kelp Extract, Yeast Extract, Guar Gum, Kelp.

Sounds healthy, right? ;) I did taste a teeny bit of it... the flavor is a super salty mix of soy sauce, (muted/old) bullion and clove. Can't say I'll be using it as a dipping sauce anytime soon (which might be a big no-no anyway, for all I know), but we'll just have to see how it is when I cook with it.

Recipes
Digging around I found different recipes out there, and so here are some I felt worthy of mention that I looked at.

Here's the first recipe video I ever looked at for soba meshi. (I know it doesn't have a lot of views, but think of it like one of those "hidden" places that can be so cool because it hasn't been discovered yet):

As you can (kinda, sorta barely) see, the chef/host used the brand Otafuku for her yakisoba sauce.

This is recipe that doesn't seem to mention yakisoba sauce or powder, and has different vegetables (including lettuce!), tuna and an egg.

The recipe video below uses yakisoba seasoning powder, instead of sauce... The chef/host/YouTube person's style of presentation might drive you a little nuts because of all the pausing, but I still had some fun watching it.

For you curry lovers out there, here's a recipe called Sobameshi Keema Curry. The soba meshi's on the left, and only has rice and noodles. (The bits on top are parsley flakes).

There's also instant soba meshi, for the convenience inclined. Just add water, give it a zap and mix in the flavored oil:

Yep. Can't say I found it terribly appealing at first sight, but it grew on me the more I watched.

The Other Soba meshi.
Of course, then there's a book that says soba meshi is rice, roasted fish and real soba noodles put in a lidded bowl, and steamed, with broth put on it after that. A few appropriate condiments include Welsh onion pieces and grated radish. It's a cold weather thing, apparently.

(I've seen books in German that mention "sobameshi" -- old books, like late 1800s type books. I wonder if they're talking about this soba meshi).


References:
Surprisingly short-ish this time!

"Chado: The Way of Tea"; Sanmi Sasaki, Shaun McCabe, Satoko Iwasaki; 2002

"A Cook's Journey to Japan"; Sarah Marx Feldner; 2010

Hyogo Tourism Guide: Sobameshi

La Fuji Mama: Spicy Sobameshi

Hyogo Tourism Guide TID Blog Go! Go! Hyogo: Sobameshi & Bokkake!

"The Rough Guide to Japan"; Jan Dodd, Simon Richmond, Sophie Branscombe, Sally McLaren, Sarah Richards; 2008

This last one's only a snippet view, so if you want to see the bit I read, you'll have to type in sobameshi and "Kobe soul food".


Picture Refs
By the way, the map of Japan came from the CIA World Factbook.

The postcard of Kobe has this for it's citation (I picked the MLA version): Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. "Birds ege [i.e., bird's eye] view of Kobe." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c260bdb3-9b88-4552-e040-e00a18066d81

The prefecture map and the green Kobe city map both came from (much as I don't like admitting it) Wikimedia. They're supposed to be public domain, have been on there since 2007, and I compared them to Google Maps and didn't notice any super vast differences in borders. So, yeah...

Tanabata

Orright, I left it late again for this month's post. Here it is, maybe a litter rougher than usual, so expect unexpected edits, including the eventual deletion of this sentence.

(However, in terms of the actual event, unlike so many other of my posts, this one is either late or early, 'cause it's all in how you look at it.)

The kanji for Tanabata. Picture by me. :)

You've probably seen it in one or two Japanese movies, even if the dialogue (original or otherwise) doesn't explain it.  Tanabata (Seventh Night, 七夕), Tanabata Matsuri (七夕祭) or Hoshi Matsuri (星祭 Star Festival) is a sort of Shakespearean/Kurosawan Christmas-y festival that somewhere along the way got kinda mixed up with Obon. The date of a city's festival depends on what the local government wants, and it falls either in July or August, though July's more common. (See why I'm both late and early?)

Historical Stuff

Another version of the first character
of Ryo no Gige. Just wanted to put that
there because all the places I pasted it
turned it into the one you see in the text
on the left there.

Let's start with on of the most common phrases you might hear about Japanese culture: it began in China. In China there was a festival (the Qixi Festival), and this festival passed into Japan in 755 AD or maybe not -- possibly that was the year it was accepted somehow by someone, probably by whoever was really running the government at the time. Or it was the first time it was celebrated. The Ryō no Gige (spelled like so: 令義解), which is from 833-ish AD (though Kokugakuin University said it was the 600s), mentions celebrating Tanabata...  and the myth connected to it may have been around in Japan since the 200s.

Courtiers celebrated it in the Heian period. The women would make what I honestly think is one of the weirdest offerings I've ever heard of: seven on silver needles and seven on gold needles onto which they stuck fruit from mountains (stuff like peaches) and "fruit" from the sea (stuff like dried bream). After that (no we're not done yet!), the kababs had five colored thread attached to them. The colors of the thread were black, blue, red, white and yellow. (I cannot imagine how that could look aesthetically appealing, but who knows?)

Can't get much more Tokugawa-y than a picture of
the tomb of Ieyasu himself!

Of course, after the offerings were done, there was also a party/banquet, with the requisite poetry and music, as well as sky-watching (by the Emperor, though I bet everyone else looked to).

During the Tokugawa shogunate/the Edo period, Tanabata became a gosekku --  one of five yearly made it a gosekku. And I've also seen it that Tanabata's popularity increased in the Edo period. All's I can say for now about this is grawr.
(major) festivals....One place I found said that the shogunate

What was Tanabata about in the Edo period? Making wishes was still a thing, but boys were supposed to wish for a level up on their calligraphy skill, and girls' their sewing skill. Though I bet the rigidity of this depended on the local sociological outlook of your family and the neighbors... and whether or not you just wished for what you wanted anyway.


Kikōden
And guess what? There's actually a festival connected to Tanabata, called kikōden. Or kikkōden -- apparently it's either. This festival is about being a better calligrapher and weaver. Women pray for improvement with both these skills. Some sources will tell you that kikkōden is the name for the Chinese festival that Tanabata came from, or is the name of the story from China. ...You must have to be really patient and open minded to be a historian and remain sane.

The Story

The first thing to remember with this section is that where there is one legend about something, there are many. And probably I've got more than one thing wrong somewhere, according to at least several tribes of historians at this moment in time, but here it is:

First there was the Chinese myth: there was a weaver princess or maid (the star Vega, which is in Lyra). There was also a cowherd/herder/cowboy (sheesh, talk about a misnomer with that last one) (Altair -- that's in Aquila). They fell in love, either because they just happened to meet or because the weaver princess's father, a celestial/sky god, had them get married and it just happened that they found they could get along in that kind of relationship.

But then, tragedy struck in the form of altered priorities: either one or both of them completely stopped doing their work or weren't as dedicated about it. The celestial/sky god did what apparently any benevolent overlord would do: he kept them away from each other, with the princess on one side of the Milky Way and the herder on the other side. He either allowed/allows them to meet only once a year, or they are able to meet (I guess once a year) behind the god's back because he's gone off to a group Buddhist sutra chant.

But, it's not as simple as it might seem. If it's rainy out, then too bad, the two stars have to wait until next year. Because the Milky Way gets too high, that's why. One recounting says that when it gets too high, the man who runs a ferry (and lives on the moon) can't get across (the moon is his boat).

Depending on your book, transformations into stars may happen. Another possible feature you might find is that a bunch of compassionate magpies turn themselves into a bridge over the Milky Way (there's also the version that they'll come if the river's flooded out).

In Japan the Chinese myth blurred into another, Japanese myth. This one involved a weaver named Tanabatatsume (didja catch the tanabata in there?). Which means 'girl of the shelved loom'. It looks like she lived near a river. Now, this next bit is me trying to put together some disparate sources here, just so's ya know: She would, once a year, go into her hut at night to receive a kami/the gods and somehow this would remove impurity from villagers (dunno how many villages there were). One place said she was saintly.

...Unless, of course, the word tanabatatsume could/does mean maidens who weave clothes for a god connected to Obon. (I wasn't entirely sure about what the source I have on this was saying.)

Getting back to the two main characters on Tanabata, did they have names? Sure did. Dunno when they got them or any of the nuances, but names I've seen for the weaver (outside Wikipedia) are Orihime -- literally "weaving princess" -- and Tanabatatsume. Names for the herder include Hikoboshi and Kengyū. (Orihime and Kengyū are common names for Vega and Altair in Japan, in fact.)


Quick Li'l Astronomy Addendum
Around the time of the 7th day of the 7th month, the moon is a crescent. And, most importantly, I expect, Vega and Altair are easy to spot at night.

The When

Tanabata is supposed to fall on the 7th day of the 7th month, lunar-ishly speaking. Scheduling Tanabata nowadays depends on which calendar a particular committee wants to use. If on the Gregorian calendar, Tanabata falls on July 7th. If you're sort of on the lunar calendar, it's August 7th. And a municipal celebration can go on for several days. So if you're going to Japan for Tanabata, make sure you check the dates of the cities that you're going to. Tourist PSA over. You may continue with your reading.

Celebrating It
One tradition involves seting up a bamboo stalk/tree. (According to a University of Virginia page for autumn haiku words, 七夕竹 (tanabatadake) is the name for this stalk/tree/cutting. I don't know if people use this name outside of writing haiku, but I thought I'd mention it.) People write their wishes on poem paper (or tanzaku, kanji: 短冊) and hang them on the stalk/tree/cutting. They also hang paper stars.

The next day, the branches released into a nearby river or into the ocean.  And the pole is put under the eves on the 6th and taken in on the 7th at night. (On that same U of A page, I found a name for this too: 七夕流し or tanabata nagashi. Though it looks like the word applies to sending the tree or the things hung on it down the river...)

Wandering the streets of a city celebrating Tanabata, you might see a certain kind of streamer called a kazari, meant to symbolize a weaver's threads. Fireworks are also a thing on Tanabata. (Hm, streamers and fireworks....)

As you might think, there are traditions that are more place specific. Like using a horse puppet instead of a bamboo stalk/tree/cutting to hang stuff on. (Do they get put into the ocean/river too?) Or lighting lanterns called nanoka-bon ("7th Day Bon". I bet you can guess where that tradition came from. Yep, Obon again.) Or hanging other stuff (dunno what yet) on the bamboo stalk/tree/cutting.


Of course, there's also the Tanabata song:

Places
Two places that have Tanabata festivals that go on for a couple of days include Sendai (In Miyagi Prefecture) and Hiratsuka City in Kanagawa Ken. Sendai's (a revenue booster started after WWII) in August while Hiratsuka City's in July. Akita and Aomori are two other places that are supposed to be known for their Tanabata. Aomori's though is kinda combined with a different festival it has, the nebuta festival.

Even Tokyo Disneyland celebrates Tanabata. They have a themed parade, and I bet you can guess who plays Kengyū and Orihime? That's right Disney's very own Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

Here's a vid on the Sendai city festival, by the way:

References:
For all (or at least some) of your star myth needs.

Japan Society: Family Program: Japan's Star Festival: Storytelling, Origami & Tanabata Decorations

Kokugakuin University: Encyclopedia of Shinto

The Art Institute of Chicago: Beyond Golden Clouds: Star Festival (Tanabata)

"Mythical Thinkings: What Can We Learn from Comparative Mythology?"; Kazuo Matsumura; 1987-2013

University of Virginia Library: Japanese Haiku a Topical Dictionary: Brief Entries: aki : Autumn

American University in Buglaria: The Star Festival Tanabata

"英語でつくる基本の和食 The Book of Basic Japanese Cooking"; 主婦の友社 (editor); 2011

City of Yokohama: Kohoku Ward: Tanabata (たなばた ) 七夕 ”Star Festival “

San Francisco Public Library: *Make a Wish for Tanabata

Shinjuku City Official Website: Know and Enjoy Japanese Culture—Tanabata (Star Festival)

"Man’yōshū and the Imperial Imagination in Early 7Japan"; Torquil Duthie; 2014

"Traditional Japanese Literature: Anthology, Beginnings to 1600"; Haruo Shirane; 2012

The Art Institute of Chicago: Beyond Golden Clouds: Star Festival (Tanabata), 1968

"Frommer's Japan Day by Day"; Mat Alt, Hiroko Yoda, Melinda Joe; 2012

Hobart and William Smith Colleges: Bartlett Family Art Gifted to HWS; Thursday, January 02, 2014

National Institute of Informatics: CiNii: "Hokusai's Watermelon as a Symbol of the Star Festival (Kikkoden) and The Romance of the Milky Way"

"A Popular Dictionary of Shinto"; Brian Bocking; 1995