Butterburs bud

[asakiyume]

In Japan, today through January 24 is the microseason called "butterburs bud"

One fond memory I have of living in Japan as a family was the 60-plus-year-old director of the daycare where my kids went teaching me how to prepare fuki. In spring you could buy it in markets, but it's also a wild herb that you can forage. I remember where we foraged ours: there was this cut-through with a little bridge, and then you came up behind/beside the Watanabes' shop, which was a sort of convenience store in their house. We bought our kerosine there. I think I still have the director's hard-to-read instructions somewhere--maybe stuck inside a Japanese cookbook. I hope so, anyway.

I've seen butterbur here and thought of picking it, but I've never done it because I'm afraid it might not be exactly the same plant. It also gets translated into English as "coltsfoot."

Here it is--not a bud, but vigorous leaves:


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And here it is, prepared:


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Wow, I guess when you cultivate it, it can get quite large! The stuff we picked is much, much smaller.


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Wikipedia tells me that the plant known as butterbur in Massachusetts, Petasites hybridus, is also called "bog rhubarb, Devil's hat, and pestilence wort." Gotta love folk names.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Hmm, well, anything I say is based on 20-plus year-old impressions, followed up by a view from a distance, but I think as a generality, it's culturally approved to be in touch with the seasons and to eat seasonal food and to appreciate the cultural heritage, which includes things like planting and harvesting rice--even though one-tenth of the population of Japan lives in Tokyo. Japan's sense of itself as a rice producer is so important (but this also gets tied up with a sense of food independence) that you'll even find small rice fields in Tokyo proper--or at least, that was true when we lived there. There were rice fields by our train station, and I think in general, urban/rural/industrial/residential are all mixed a little more closely... Again, speaking based on my impressions.

That said, although Confucianism (which was very influential in Japan 1600-1868) rates food producers very highly, in fact peasants were scorned and looked down on by pretty much everyone, the way they seem to be by urban/sophisticated populations the world over, and in the Heian period, when the nobles would go out in nature, it was highly formalized, curated version of nature, not real wilds (except when people were exiled--then they were out in the wilds and were miserable) ... I think the non-human world *was* seen as a place for sport and excursion.

[amaebi]

Ah, thanks. Well, that's sad. The non-human world curated and objectified in thought there, too.

:(

BTW, I meant "Elnora," not some Latinx "Elnord." Spellcheck.

[asakiyume]

But there, as here, that doesn't mean that some/many people don't have a sincere and more deep relationship with the natural world. There are lots of people there who do. And here too.