80 BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 
No. 6.— Observations on a Malt-Glucose, known as ‘‘ Midzu- 
ame,” made in Japan from Rice and Millet. By ¥. H. 
Srorer, Professor of Agricultural Chemistry in Harvard 
University, and Grorer W. Roxrs, Instructor in Sugar 
Analysis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 
Several years ago one of us chanced to read in E, R. Skidmore’s 
Jinrikisha Days in Japan,* the following statement : — 
‘¢Uraga (near Yokosuka) is notable as a place where midzu- 
ame or millet honey is made. ‘The whole town is given up to the 
production of the amber sweet, and there are certain families 
whose midzu-ame has not varied in excellence for more than three 
hundred years.’ The rice or millet is soaked, steamed, mixed 
with warm water and barley malt, and left to stand a few hours, 
when a clear yellow liquid is drawn off and boiled down to a 
thick syrup or paste, or cooked until it can be moulded into hard 
balls. Unaffected by weather, it is the best of Japanese sweets, 
and in its semi-liquid state is twisted out on chop-sticks at all 
seasons of the year. The older and browner the midzu-ame is 
the better. It may be called the apotheosis of butter-scotch, a 
glorified oriental taffy, constantly urged upon one for one’s own 
good, and conceded by foreign physicians in Japan to be of great 
value for dyspeptics and consumptives.. Though prepared all 
over the Empire, this curative sweet is the specialty of Uraga; 
and the secrets and formulas held in the old families make for 
Uraga midzu-ame, as compared with other productions, a reputa- 
tion akin to that of the Grande Chartreuse or Schloss Johannis- 
berger, among other cordials or wines. Street artists mould 
midzu-ame paste, and blow it with a pipe into myriad fantastic 
shapes for their small patrons; while at the greatest banquets, 
and even on the Emperor’s table, it appears in the fanciful flowers 
that decorate every feast.” 
It appeared from this statement that the Japanese have for 
several hundred years been accustomed to prepare a malt-glucose 
of superior quality which in respect to excellence had no counter- 
part in Europe. It was not until the year 1814 that the fact 
became known in Europe in any definite, scientific way that starch 
* New York, 1891, page 37. 
