30th April – 卯月
One types of dried fruits, preserved food. Pickling plum in salt and then dry it. Umeboshi has very strong salty taste and includes Citric acid and Malic acid.
梅干し (Umeboshi) is definitely not everybody’s taste, some extremely love it but others hate it due to the strong salty taste. Despite this super salty taste, it has a lot positive effects on human body and actually it is an healthy food with moderation.
Umeboshi came to Japan as an anti-coughing, anti-fever and anti-vomiting medicines from China long time ago. It has クエン酸 (Kuen San = Citric acid), which makes stomach digestion well and improve the apatite. Moreover it also contains リンゴ酸 (Lingo San = Malic acid), which disassemble 乳酸 (Nyuu San = Lactic acid) so it promote recovering from exhaustion.
Therefore, some of the effects that can be expected from eating Umeboshi are:
-Anti-aging
-Recovering from hangover
-Relieving constipation
-Heat stroke prevention
etc…
Umeboshi has not only those health related effects but also good for taking the fish smell off, preserve food from going bad and so on!
If you plant the Umeboshi seeds, it won’t grow sadly, because it was pickled in the salt.
When you open the Umeboshi seeds, there are little fruit part called 仁 (Jin) and it is also called as 天神様 (Tenjin Sama). This name derive from the famous noble 菅原道真 (Sugawara no Michizane), he was later called as the god of study. He loved plum so much. Because he was the noble and the seed part was called as his nickname, people in Edo era thought it is a bad deed to throw Umeboshi seeds away. Consequently, they made a place to locate all the holly seeds (梅干しの種収め所, Umeboshi no tane Osame Dokoro) in 太宰府天満宮 (Dazaifu Tenmanguu), Fukuoka.
仁 contains 青酸 (Seisan = Hydrocyanic acid) thus considered as poisonous when it is not ripen. However when it is ripen, it is safe so do not worry.
Remember, moderation is the key for good health, as Umeboshi has so much salt in it!
Little Japan Dictionary 