Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/53

 coming from Glasgow yards, and others having been built at these docks.

Uraga, reached from Yokosuka by a winding, Cornice-like road along the coast, is doubly notable as being the port off which Commodore Perry’s ships first anchored, and the place where midzu ame, or millet honey, is made. The whole picturesque, clean little 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 semiliquid stage is twisted out on chopsticks 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 reputation akin to that of the Grande Chartreuse, or Schloss Johannisberger, 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. 37