A thing or two on DIY umeshu

        An old Chinese saying “peaches and plums houseful” denotes a respected teacher having great number of good students and disciples, and not untrue for the group of plants containing peaches, plums, apricots, dates and alike, in botany, collectively understood as the subfamily Amygdaloideae. Aside from a woody-textured seed, fruit of these fruits are often fleshy and succulent. That ume, in Japanese, also as Japanese apricot, mei, or Chinese plum, an Asian Exclusive (endemic in East Asia), was native in mainland China along the drainage-basin of Yangtze River (or Chang Jiang), later introduced to elsewhere in Asia, and now a daily encounter in Korea and Japan. Some believed the ume was among one of those earliest domesticated plants: precursors in artificially selecting and cultivating plants bearing good fruits (after devouring some nice ones), which abandoning other plants which yield less palatable ones. After countless generations of deliberate selection, identification of the original ancestral strain in the wild eventually deems impossible. While appreciating blossoms in the chills, and harvesting fruits early summer, preserving the fruits by pickling appeared as a sensible routine.