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While a particular country's cuisine tends to reflect both the climate and culture of that country, pickles are a form of preserved food, created through fermentation, which are found in cultures throughout the world. The practice of pickling vegetables or meat and fish in salt is probably one of the earliest methods ever utilized by humans to preserve foods. Sauerkraut, one of the best-known pickled foods in the West, is said to have come into existence before the birth of Christ. The forerunners of today's Japanese pickles already existed in the Nara period (710–784), and the pickling of vegetables or meat and fish was almost certainly an established practice at an even earlier period.
Though no hard evidence for such hypothesis, a creation myth for Japanese pickles originating from the Kayatsu Shrine in Aichi Prefecture, a shrine dedicated to the patron god of pickling, deserves mention. It seems that separate offerings of vegetables and salt were inadvertently placed in the same container, resulting by pure chance in the creation of the first Japanese pickles. An ancient hero from Japanese mythology, Yamatotakeru-no-Mikoto, says the legend, ate these pickled vegetables. |
