Sansai in Springtime
We all know that a wave of cherry blossoms breaks across Japan come spring. But this isn’t the only plant of note which blooms with new flowers. Spring brings many new plants and sprouts, a good many of which are edible.
If you are out somewhere in Tohoku, you might catch a scene like this; ordinary folk out picking edible plants which are considered a delicacy.
My new favorite sansai, or mountain vegetable, is fuki no to, known to the west as the Butterbur sprout, or, as my mother taught me, sweet colt’s foot.
The shoots first come up as snow is melting away, and appears bright gold, due to a lack of chlorophyll.
Our favorite family way to eat fuki no to is to serve it as tempura. The best shoots are very young with the buds barely open. I would describe the flavor as rich and just slightly bitter, sort of like an artichoke. On the train across Tohoku, I kept looking at the shoots while thinking, “If only I could get out and go picking! Those look so good!”
You can of course find fuki no to for sale in some stores. But it’s so much satisfying to harvest your own. (This is a special post for one Mrs. Pink!)
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perfeckt 10:10
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Once, in a game we ported to English (Season of the Sakura), the characters went sansai gathering. It was too hard to explain this to people though, so we changed it to mushrooms. ^_^
Love sansai soba though.
May 1st, 2007 at 2:16 pmGreat post.
When I was staying in Hayama, there was a little mountain directly behind the town. Almost only a hill wearing high heels, actually. A track lead down off it into the street I was staying in, and one morning 3 Nannas came trotting down with bags full of shoots, mushrooms, and what looked like twigs.
Being Tigger, I gave them the third degree, and they were really pleased to tell me all about it, of which I maybe understood one tenth,but they did say it was a seasonal thing, you could eat the stuff, all of it, it was so really good for the body, and when I asked if it was only for the people there (thinking it might be a “common right” like some villages had in Europe) they said, no, it was for old people who wake up the earliest.
What surprised me was the variety of different types of things. New Zealand never had anything like as many eatable types of plants, before Europeans came. Certainly nothing like as many types of mushroom, I think there were only three here when the Maori came.
Great post, Marie Mockett.
May 1st, 2007 at 2:58 pmPeter–The whole time we were “harvesting,” I kept thinking of the game Oblivion in which which characters tromp around the countryside picking mushrooms and plants. I almost threw in the reference…
Did New Zealand really not have as many plants? Did any of the native plants lose out to invaders?
I’m trying to imagine a hill wearing high heels. I rather like the image.
May 1st, 2007 at 9:22 pmOh, we had plenty of plants, just very few native food plants and mushrooms.
) plants from the mythic homeland of hawaiiki, on his magic flying bird. 
Maori brought with them two kinds of gourd, and later on Tamatane brought Kumara ( sweet potato and actually a specific type that originated, thats right, in JAPAN
There were certain grasses that could be eaten, one being Captain Cooks “Scurvey grass” and ONE tree produces a nut that after soaking for a week, with repeated changes of water and much kneading, can be eaten by people. Another tree “Cabbage tree” can be felled, the trunk split in two and the pith similarly soaked and pounded, and can be eaten by people. And one fern root can be eaten. And I think , as I said, only three eatable fungi. I know that fungi that in other countries are perfectly safe, are deadly here for some reason. Oh, and the native bee makes honey, but it is not nourishing to human beings. And that was it. The cabbage tree only grows in the north of the country, the scurvy grass ( now extinct ) in the south.
And yes in deed, many native plants are gone, if not lucky enough to have been on remote off shore islands. The Maori kumara was extinct here, because we had better potatos once europeans came, but we have some back now, because its botanical discription was identified as the native Japanese sweet potato in the 50s, and some Maori leaders went to Japan and brought back plants.
May 2nd, 2007 at 3:39 pmI have read that Cooks scurvey grass was extinct within 30 years of his describing it, because the whaling ships, all this way from home, needed sources of vitamin c.
[...] of the “mountain vegetables” which you can pick and eat is tsukushi, or horsetail [...]
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:00 am