Sweets
Imobota
Imobota — a taro-and-rice mochi wrapped around sweet red bean paste
A Nara-style sweet rice cake made by cooking taro into non-glutinous rice, mashing it, and wrapping it around sweet red bean paste. When glutinous rice was precious, taro's own stickiness is said to have stood in for it, and in many areas it is offered at the household altar on the Day of the Boar in November, once the harvest is in.
- Origin: Nara
- About 380 km west of Tokyo
What it's made of
Imobota is a sweet potato version of botamochi rice cake handed down on the Yumigahama Peninsula. It looks much like ordinary botamochi, but a faintly yellow filling peeks through the gaps in the red bean paste, and the first bite reveals more sweet potato sweetness than the usual rice-forward taste of botamochi — a distinctive treat born from stretching a scarce supply of mochi rice with sweet potato.
How it's made
Sliced sweet potato is spread in the bottom of a rice cooker, topped with mochi rice, covered with water, and cooked together. Once done, sugar and salt are stirred in while still hot, and the mixture is mashed with a pestle and shaped into balls. Leftover New Year mochi is sometimes combined with sweet potato in the same way. Today the balls are often coated in soybean flour, aonori seaweed powder, or red bean paste in different colors, sold as a "three-color imobota."
Why it took this shape
The Yumigahama Peninsula is largely sandy ground, poorly suited to rice cultivation. Cultivation of sweet potato is said to have spread after Ido Heizaemon, a magistrate of the Omori silver mine domain in the mid-Edo period, brought seed tubers to the San'in region from Satsuma, and by around 1887 sweet potato had reportedly become a staple crop of the area. The idea of stretching a limited supply of mochi rice by bulking it out with sweet potato is said to have given rise to this region's distinctive take on botamochi.
Before You Go
- How to shop in a depachika (department store food hall)A guide to browsing prepared foods and bento, choosing wagashi as a gift with a good shelf life, sampling etiquette, end-of-day discounts, asking for cold packs and wrapping, and finding your way around a depachika floor.
- Osechi and zoni for the New YearA guide to the meaning behind osechi's tiered boxes, the regional differences in zoni (square vs. round mochi, clear vs. miso broth), and the nanakusa-gayu custom.
- Setsubun: ehomaki and lucky beansA guide to ehomaki, the uncut sushi roll said to be eaten facing a lucky direction on Setsubun, and to mamemaki, the bean-throwing custom with roasted lucky beans.
Dishes in the same style
- Abekawa MochiFresh-pounded rice cake is dusted in soybean flour mixed with sugar. Named for the Abe River, it's said to have been famous among Tokaido travelers as a teahouse specialty and to appear in the travel novel Tokaidochu Hizakurige.
- Iga ManjuSweet bean paste is wrapped in rice flour dough, then coated with dyed sticky rice grains. One account ties the name to the grains' resemblance to a chestnut's spiny husk, and in the western Mikawa region it's said to be offered to Hina dolls at the Doll Festival.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Contrast
- ImomochiSweet potatoes grown on red clay bluffs are pounded together with a smaller-than-usual measure of sticky rice into this treat from the Kumano coast. Said to have begun as a way to stretch scarce rice on land ill-suited to growing it, it's toasted once it cools and firms up.
- Fuki DawaraA rice ball from the Yamato Highlands, made from rice cooked with roasted soybeans and salt, then wrapped in butterbur leaves. It is said to be set out along the paddy ridge beside the rice seedlings at sabiraki, the rite marking the start of planting, and shaped to resemble a straw rice bale, which gives it its name.
Also from Nara
- Amago no KanroniRiver trout, called the queen of the mountain stream, first grilled plain and then simmered in roasted tea before being finished sweet and savory in soy sauce and mirin — a dish of the Yoshino and Uda districts. The fish is said to have little of a river-fish's usual edge, and the dish is remembered as a mother's home cooking.
- Asuka NabeA hot pot from Asuka Village of chicken and seasonal vegetables simmered in milk and dashi. It is said to trace to a dairy product brought from Tang China in the Asuka period and later reworked by monks who simmered their chickens in milk, taking its present form around the early Showa era.
- Ayu ZushiA whole sweetfish pressed onto vinegared rice, made along the Yoshino River. Sweetfish, raised on river-stone algae, are called kogyo, 'fragrant fish,' and the sushi is said to have become known in part because a sushi shop featured in a kabuki play actually existed in Nara.
- DengaraA sweet from Higashiyoshino and Kawakami villages: bean-paste mochi steamed inside magnolia leaves. It is made for Boys' Day, wishing a son success and safe growth, and because each leaf on a single branch is wrapped around its own mochi, the finished cluster hangs like a bunch of fruit.
- Ei no NikogoriRed stingray simmered sweet and savory in soy sauce and sugar, a Nara dish. Its own gelatin dissolves into the cooking liquid and sets into a jelly once cooled, giving the dish its name, nikogori. It is said to have been eaten together with noppei at Kasuga Shrine's Wakamiya festival.
- Hangesho MochiA Nara Basin mochi pounded from cracked wheat and glutinous rice around hangesho, the eleventh day after the summer solstice. It is made at the point when the wheat harvest and rice planting both wind down, and is also called sanaburi mochi for the rite that sends off the rice-field deity.