Pickled Plums (2004-06-26)
My girlfriend brought me a bag of candies from Taiwan. They are hard candies with a very salty bone-dry plum in the center. When you eat one, the flavors of sweetness, saltiness and sourness fill your mouth all at once. It is very unusual but delicious. You can suck on one for hours and the flavor from the stone of the plum continues to roll out.
Japanese love their pickled plums. They are not dry like those
in the candies but they are very salty and sour. People here use
them in cooking or eat them alone with plain rice. Sometimes they
can be found inside a sushi roll or as stuffing in meat dishes, there
is even pickled plum sake for sale. Often times in summer you
will see a single pickled plum placed on top of rice in a boxed
lunch. Many Japanese believe the preserved fruit has the power to
kill bacteria in food (Huh? Like how?)
thus reducing the chance of getting food poisoning.
No amount of pickled plums will help if people continue to eat unrefrigerated boxed lunches. It is common to see boxed lunch sitting on shelves for goodness knows how long in the food section of department stores before office workers pick one up and eat it in the park. These people could very well be digging in a boxful of salmonella. As the cases of food poisoning rise sharply in summer, I'll stay away from boxed lunch and stick to my candies from Taiwan.
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