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wombat1138A connection I hadn't made before:
In the RK OVA, the morning after Kenshin first meets Tomoe and brings her back to the inn, Iizuka teases him about her while eating an umeboshi. Kenshin gets up and leaves, with a cold intensity that freezes the room (a much more subtle response than in the original manga, where Kenshin get overtly angry and makes Iizuka panic). Recovering, Iizuka calls after him, "Hey, you made me swallow the [umeboshi] pit!"
Today's local farmers' market had some little sour green plums that made me wonder if I could make umeboshi out of them, although when I chatted a bit with that vendor, he said that these were a slightly different variety. He does have an ume tree that's currently shedding fruit all over the place, but they're even smaller and more sour than these little green dudes. (Rather like olives, umeboshi seem to be edible only after a lengthy treatment process. I ate an olive right off a tree once, and was very very sorry.)
I bought a small quantity of them anyway, and brought them home to look up some umeboshi recipes. I'll probably need to go out again to get shiso leaves; pretty sure I've seen them at the local Asian megamarts, and need to restock some other pantry staples from there anyway. But meanwhile, one umeboshi site notes that like many members of its family (plums, peaches, apricots, almonds), ume pits contain amygdalin, a complex molecule that releases small amounts of cyanide and benzaldehyde when digested.
Purified benzaldehyde is sold as artificial almond flavoring, but has a flatter sensory impact because it doesn't have the faint bitterness of residual cyanide that's present in the natural product. On further reaction, the benzaldehyde becomes benzoic acid; in combination with the high saline concentration, this naturally preserves traditionally-made umeboshi for an unlimited length of time.
But back to the pit, there's apparently a taboo against eating them, as they're identified with the spirit of "Tenjin-Sama (Sugiwara Michizane)" (not really sure what this reference means; will have to look it up)... and, of course, because of the cyanide.
Conclusion: at the least, Iizuka's pit-gulp is not just a comical mishap but a sign of ill-omen, and possibly even an overt foreshadowing of death.
Meanwhile, wrt actual umeboshi recipes, most of the ones out there seem to be "quickie" versions that depend on shochu (dilstilled liquor) for preservation. The traditional one seems to simply layer the washed/dried ume with salt and weight them down in a jar to let the juices gradually submerge them; after a few days, some red shiso leaves are kneaded with more salt, squeezed out, mixed with a small amount of juice/brine, and poured back into the jar. Eventually, when there are three days of hot and dry weather expected, the ume are decanted and air-dried for three days (and apparently returned back to the jar of brine every night?). Final storage is back in the jar of pink brine juice again, now no longer weighted down.
I have some store-bought umeboshi in the back of the fridge. I think I need to eat one now.
Addendum: Sugiwara Michizane appears to be a ~10th century official in the Imperial Court who has since been deified as the patron saint of calligraphy. (Possible link with the innkeeper's praise of Tomoe's handwriting?) The closest corroboration of the umeboshi link is a 1951 cite via Google of a children's chant that partially goes, "Hitoyama koete, futayama koete Mitsuyama no okuno, Kitsune-san, Kitsune-san, Asobojanaika, Imagohan no saichu Okazu wa nanni, Umeboshi, koko, Gohan wa nanni ...", but it's from a limited-access database and I can't pull up the rest of the article.
(I really doubt my library system has it, but might as well splat down the ref just in case: Rhymes Sung by Japanese Children, Gwladys F. Hughes, Western Folklore, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Jan., 1951), pp. 34-54.)
Re-addendum: Aha, almost every other ref spells his family name as SugAwara. From here:
And,
In the RK OVA, the morning after Kenshin first meets Tomoe and brings her back to the inn, Iizuka teases him about her while eating an umeboshi. Kenshin gets up and leaves, with a cold intensity that freezes the room (a much more subtle response than in the original manga, where Kenshin get overtly angry and makes Iizuka panic). Recovering, Iizuka calls after him, "Hey, you made me swallow the [umeboshi] pit!"
Today's local farmers' market had some little sour green plums that made me wonder if I could make umeboshi out of them, although when I chatted a bit with that vendor, he said that these were a slightly different variety. He does have an ume tree that's currently shedding fruit all over the place, but they're even smaller and more sour than these little green dudes. (Rather like olives, umeboshi seem to be edible only after a lengthy treatment process. I ate an olive right off a tree once, and was very very sorry.)
I bought a small quantity of them anyway, and brought them home to look up some umeboshi recipes. I'll probably need to go out again to get shiso leaves; pretty sure I've seen them at the local Asian megamarts, and need to restock some other pantry staples from there anyway. But meanwhile, one umeboshi site notes that like many members of its family (plums, peaches, apricots, almonds), ume pits contain amygdalin, a complex molecule that releases small amounts of cyanide and benzaldehyde when digested.
Purified benzaldehyde is sold as artificial almond flavoring, but has a flatter sensory impact because it doesn't have the faint bitterness of residual cyanide that's present in the natural product. On further reaction, the benzaldehyde becomes benzoic acid; in combination with the high saline concentration, this naturally preserves traditionally-made umeboshi for an unlimited length of time.
But back to the pit, there's apparently a taboo against eating them, as they're identified with the spirit of "Tenjin-Sama (Sugiwara Michizane)" (not really sure what this reference means; will have to look it up)... and, of course, because of the cyanide.
Conclusion: at the least, Iizuka's pit-gulp is not just a comical mishap but a sign of ill-omen, and possibly even an overt foreshadowing of death.
Meanwhile, wrt actual umeboshi recipes, most of the ones out there seem to be "quickie" versions that depend on shochu (dilstilled liquor) for preservation. The traditional one seems to simply layer the washed/dried ume with salt and weight them down in a jar to let the juices gradually submerge them; after a few days, some red shiso leaves are kneaded with more salt, squeezed out, mixed with a small amount of juice/brine, and poured back into the jar. Eventually, when there are three days of hot and dry weather expected, the ume are decanted and air-dried for three days (and apparently returned back to the jar of brine every night?). Final storage is back in the jar of pink brine juice again, now no longer weighted down.
I have some store-bought umeboshi in the back of the fridge. I think I need to eat one now.
Addendum: Sugiwara Michizane appears to be a ~10th century official in the Imperial Court who has since been deified as the patron saint of calligraphy. (Possible link with the innkeeper's praise of Tomoe's handwriting?) The closest corroboration of the umeboshi link is a 1951 cite via Google of a children's chant that partially goes, "Hitoyama koete, futayama koete Mitsuyama no okuno, Kitsune-san, Kitsune-san, Asobojanaika, Imagohan no saichu Okazu wa nanni, Umeboshi, koko, Gohan wa nanni ...", but it's from a limited-access database and I can't pull up the rest of the article.
(I really doubt my library system has it, but might as well splat down the ref just in case: Rhymes Sung by Japanese Children, Gwladys F. Hughes, Western Folklore, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Jan., 1951), pp. 34-54.)
Re-addendum: Aha, almost every other ref spells his family name as SugAwara. From here:
"[T]he Japanese proverb 'Ume wo kuu to mo sane kuu na, naka ni Tenjin nete gozaru' [...] translates roughly to 'Even if you eat (the meat of) an ume, don't eat the seed; Tenjin sleeps inside', and can be interpreted as 'If you eat ume seeds, you're going to end up getting your stomach pumped, sucker.'"
And,
"Tenjin was, in his most ancient form, a generic thunder god; this changed after a government minister named Sugawara no Michizane (845-903) was treated badly by his political opponents and came back from death as a total badass, calling down lightning on the descendants of those responsible for ousting him from power. This obvious association with thunder lead to him assuming the role of the older Tenjin. Tenjin's link with ume does not end with the above proverb; ume trees are often found growing within shrines dedicated to his worship."