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of Japanese towns than shops of any other kind, it proves that 

 this vegetable is the most common and popular single article 

 of food after rice. It is also much cheaper, and besides be- 

 ing recognized as a strong or nourishing food, it is con- 

 sidered a good luck food. If eaten at the first meal of the 

 day, and on the first day of the year, the lucky beans will 

 ensure strength and good luck for the day and the year. From 

 the beginning of the modern era the people have been exhorted 

 to grow and eat more beans and less rice. It was the Japanese 

 who first appreciated the value and the trade possibilities of 

 the more prolific soya bean of Manchuria and developed the 

 great export trade in that article. 



Eighteen kinds of mame are sold in the large wholesale 

 shops, many of them varieties and qualities of the same bean. 

 Dried peas are classed with beans and sold in the same shops, 

 and are also cooked with sugar and sold as sweets. Besides 

 cooking them with sugar and sweet shoyu, the boiled beans are 

 made into neru, or sweet paste, and yokan or jelly, which are 

 the base of three-fourths of all the sweets sold by confec- 

 tioners . 



The small red adzuki bean (S. P. I. No. 34643) is the one 

 most used for these pastes and jellies, the white adzuki (S. 

 P. I. No. 34644) only affording a color contrast and serving 

 as a medium for other color devices. The plebian word mame is 

 never applied to the adzuki. One asks for and refers to 

 adzuki only. Three qualities are sold, the largest and red- 

 dest selling at about .15 U. S. cents for a measure equalling 

 our quart. The medium quality, selling for about .10 cents a 

 quart, is mostly used by confectioners. A meal or flour of 

 ground and sifted adzuki is made but it is not used by the 

 confectioners. The adzuki meal is most often used for making 

 a soup or hasty pudding which is considered a valuable morning 

 food for invalids, the aged, and delicate children. Much 

 color and flavor is said to lie in the husks or thin shells, 

 and this is lost by the use of the bolted meal. The "red 

 rice" of festival occasions, the New Year, marriage feasts and 

 other ceremonial events, is made by adding the rice to the 

 water in which adzuki are already boiling and cooking them 

 together. 



For neru, or bean paste, adzuki are washed and boiled in 

 large copper pans, the water twice changed in the half hour 

 and each time as deeply dyed. When the adzuki are soft enough 

 to press away between the fingers, the mass is thrown in a 

 hopper and ground to break the skins which are removed by rub- 

 bing through a sieve. The pulp is pressed in a bag to expel 

 all the water and cooked again with sugar, beaten and stirred 

 all the time with a big paddle. This dark, red sweet paste 

 which tastes something between maple sugar and candied chest- 

 nuts is most commonly met as balls or dumplings encased in a 

 thin tough shell of soft rice paste. Glutinous rice flour is 



