Making Japanese Plum Wine

My mother’s visiting from San Francisco this week, and we celebrated Mother’s Day and the abundance of spring by bottling up six quarts of Japanese plum wine. When I posted a photo of the finished product online, several people asked for the recipe. So here it is, for all to enjoy.

Rock crystal sugar (left), neutral spirits (right).

Japanese plum wine (umeshu in Japanese) isn’t really wine. It’s sweetened plum-flavored liqueur. If you have an over-productive plum tree (as we do), this is a great way to thin the tree and make something useful from the thinnings. And if you endure hot summers (as we do), there’s nothing better than ice-cold plum wine to greet a warm evening.

INGREDIENTS (makes 2 qts)

• 30-40 unblemished green (unripe) plums
• 1 kilogram rock crystal sugar (kōrizato in Japanese; you may only need 2/3 kg, but it usually comes in one-kilo bags)
• one 750-ml bottle of neutral spirits (preferably Japanese shōchū, but any neutral spirit will work, like vodka)

Sort through your plums and discard any that are blemished or broken. Pull off stems and leaves. Wash under running water, then let dry. I usually lay them out on a drying rack or a cloth-covered tray, then set in a warm, shady place to dry.

Meanwhile, gather and wash the jars you’re going to use. I’ve used pint jars, quart-sized jars, and half-gallon Mason jars, but find the quart-sized ones work best. They just fit more easily in the fridge once opened. This time round, since I was using so many jars and most of them had been previously used and were a bit dusty, I ran them through the dishwasher. But I don’t generally bother sterilizing them, given the high alcohol content. (For lids I just use plastic lids or a used, clean set of bands and seals.)

Bring the dry fruit inside, then start assembling your jars of plum wine. This part’s fun and easy. You just alternate layers of plums and sugar. I start with a layer of plums (four to six, depending on their size & the size of the jar), cover with a layer of sugar, then plums, then sugar, up to the top of the jar. Then pour the spirits over till you’ve covered everything. If you have a plum sticking out over the liquid at the top, take it out. Everything should be covered. (For a quart-sized jar, I need 16-18 plums & about 1/3 kg of sugar.)

Now seal up your jars and label them. I always write the year and what kind of liqueur I’ve used. It’s definitely worth experimenting. Experiments that have worked for us: Vodka. Korean soju (usually cheaper than shōchū but pre-sweetened with corn syrup, so not my first choice). Experiments that did NOT work: Gin (yuck). Turbinado sugar instead of rock crystal sugar (gross). I’ve never tried it with other varieties of fruit, like pluots, but it’d be worth a try.

Store your jars in a cool, dry place like a wine cellar, if you’re lucky enough to have one. We store all our jarred stuff in the bottom of a linen closet. When the Apocalypse comes, we’ll be drinking plum wine and eating homemade jam till the end of the world.

Apparently you can start drinking umeshu within three to six months, but I’ve always waited till the following summer, when the rising temperatures remind me of the pleasures of chilled plum wine. The sugar will dissolve, the plums will darken, and the liqueur take on an amber color.

This stuff keeps for a long time in storage. It’s 2013, and we’re just now finishing our 2009 batch. Once we open a jar, we do keep it in the fridge. It keeps for a long time there too.

Umeshu is strong stuff (most shōchū are 24% alcohol), so a little goes a long way. I like it best splashed over ice and diluted with some water. Kampai!

(Note: All photos from 2009. My letting-it-go-gray hair does not look like this today!)

10 Questions About My Book: A Next Big Thing Blog Hop Posting

Reference books for my La Pérouse project

My friend, writer and fellow (sister?) Hedgebrook alum Christine Lee Zilka, tagged me this week to talk about my current writing project as part of a “Next Big Thing” blog hop.

I don’t ordinarily go for these “I’ll-link-to-your-blog-if-you-link-to-mine” arrangements, but this one, which involves answering ten specific questions about a current or next project, actually looked fun. And Christine’s quite engaging post, with its great photo of her door-o’-color-coded-post-its, inspired me to give it a try.

The “blog hop” deal also entails me tagging some other writers to do likewise; their names and links to their websites follow my answers.

What is the working title of your book (or story)?
It’s called Landfalls, at least until an agent or editor tells me to change it.

What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Landfalls re-imagines events in and around the La Pérouse expedition, an 18th-century voyage of exploration that started in France in 1785 and ended with shipwreck in the South Seas in 1788.

The map that started it all

Where did the idea for the book come from?
From an antique map my husband gave me for my birthday more than ten years ago. An incompetent (or unscrupulous) map-seller told my husband it was an 18th-century map of San Francisco Bay. But after staring at it for a long time and noticing some obvious clues, like the clearly marked latitude lines on the map, I learned it was actually a map of Lituya Bay in Alaska, and that it was from the La Pérouse expedition, which I had never heard of before. I started reading about the voyage, and almost immediately thought: This would make a great book.

What genre does your book fall under?
What is it Polonius says in Hamlet—“tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral”? Yeah, that.

But in all sincerity: Historical fiction. Specifically, nautical fiction. Hopefully more broadly conceived than the genre has traditionally been. And hopefully of the more or less literary variety, whatever that means. Also, it started out explicitly as linked short stories, but on the advice of counsel, I’ve started calling it a novel.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Well, most of the characters are French and male. I’m afraid I don’t know very much about who’s who in French cinema. Just—please, no Gerard Depardieu!

A few years ago a French director, Xavier Gens, was apparently working on a film about the La Pérouse expedition, or about the end of the expedition, anyway—some sort of cannibal flick set in the South Seas. It sounded hideous, to be perfectly frank. But rumors had him in talks with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Viggo Mortensen. I love both actors. But I don’t quite see them playing 18th-century French explorers.

Yes, please.

I do have an English character in one story/chapter early on. His name is John Webber and he was a real person, a landscape artist and portraitist who accompanied Cook on his third and final voyage. I wouldn’t mind seeing the beautiful British actor Ben Whishaw in that role.

And if we were to cast British actors as Frenchmen—because isn’t that what we do?—I could see Benedict Cumberbatch on one of the frigates. In fact, I’d love to have a whole Sherlock/Elementary thing going, with Martin Freeman and Johnny Lee Miller on board as well.

For the women in the book, I could imagine roles for Dame Judi Dench pretending to be French and Isabelle Adjani not pretending and Penelope Cruz as a Spanish woman the explorers met in California, if she wouldn’t mind looking a bit worse for wear. Continuing with the Holmes thing from above, I might have a role for Lucy Liu, for an episode set in Macao.

Sadly, I suspect that my enthusiastic and long-winded reply to this question, the one question here that’s really not about the writing at all, is indicative of my distractibility, one of the reasons the manuscript is still not done.

Light at the end of the tunnel? Or just a delusional spreadsheet?

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Represented by an agency, if one will have me.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
I’m still working on it (see above re: distractibility). Year eight. I do see light at the end of the tunnel. But I may be hallucinating.

What other books would you compare this story to, within your genre?
I can’t quite think of a book that it resembles. I’ve obviously been inspired by other novels of the sea—Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick, the Aubrey/Maturin series, the Horatio Hornblower books, Karen Hesse’s middle-grade novel Stowaway—but I don’t think my book is much like any of those. Writers who do the kind of historical fiction that both delights and inspires me include Pat Barker, Andrea Barrett, Jim Shephard, and David Leavitt, whose novel The Indian Clerk I just finished and may blog about soon. As for other linked story collections, I’ve enjoyed Cathy Day’s The Circus in Winter and, of course, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I’m not sure how this question differs from the one above, about where the idea came from. But I will say that there was a gap of several years between conceiving the initial idea and the start of writing. And this will sound like arrogant nonsense, but honestly, it seemed such a brilliant and even obvious idea for a work of fiction that I was afraid someone else would write it first. So I started writing. Which suggests that ultimately, I was inspired by paranoia, but not sufficiently inspired to write quickly.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
There are many attractive young men in peril on the high seas. Sometimes they have sex.

Please check out these other writers, whom I have tagged, for their answers to the same questions (their replies may not be up right away, but their websites and writing are worth checking out anyway):

• Michelle Dicinoski, another Hedgebrook friend and author of the poetry collection Electricity for Beginners and the forthcoming memoir Ghost Wife.
• Donna George Storey, an old friend and the prolific author of erotic literary fiction and marvelous literary erotica, including the novel Amorous Woman.
• Margaret Duarte, who took a fiction-writing class of mine some years ago, a writer of “visionary” fiction and a prolific blogger about all things writing and publishing.
• Martin Wilson, author of the much-acclaimed What They Always Tell Us and a friend I’m always surprised to remember I haven’t yet met “in real life”

My Year of Going Gray

Getting in touch with my “roots”

It started 12 or 13 years ago, when I was in my mid-30s. I had two small children, a cool dot-com job with many younger colleagues, and a sprinkling of gray hair. I didn’t mind the gray too much, but sometimes there’d be a wiry one or one that stood straight up from my head. I didn’t care for those. My hairdresser encouraged me to let her try coloring it. I did. It looked pretty. It was fun. So I kept doing it.

But now I’m going to stop. I’m letting myself go gray this year, and judging from my roots, I’ll be way more salt than pepper.

UH…WHY?

What We Read in 2012

Best. Book. Ever.

For the third year in a row, I’m publishing the lists of books that my husband Dan and I read this past year. Interestingly, we both started the year with Melville, he with Billy Budd and I with Moby-Dick. A good way to start a year of reading, methinks.

The only book we both read was Don’t Take Me the Long Way, a memoir by M. C. Mars, whose cab Dan and I had the good fortune to ride in after our 25th anniversary dinner at La Folie in San Francisco. He regaled us with stories both wonderful and harrowing about driving in the City, and I eventually said in my writerly and English-teacher-y way, “Have you thought about writing some of this down?”

“I have written it down,” he said, and held up a book. He had a small box of them next to him on the front seat. We added its price to the cab fare, he signed it for us, and it ended up being the only book that both Dan and I read this year. It’s pretty entertaining stuff.

Excess is the New Dreary: Restoration Hardware’s Fall 2012 “Source Book”

Pretentious much?

Last Friday afternoon, I opened my front door to collect my mail and discovered that the postman had left one piece of mail on the ledge next to our mailbox. The piece was so large it did not fit in the mailbox.

“What the hell?” I said (I talk to myself a lot when I’m home alone), and stepped outside to collect it.

Of course. Only Restoration Hardware would have the arrogance to send a mailing so large it doesn’t fit inside a standard mailbox.

Quarter-Century

August 15, 1987

My husband Dan and I were married 25 years ago today. In honor of this milestone, I share the following:

A few weeks ago, an alarm went off in our house in the middle of the night. Dan got up to investigate. He returned a minute later and crawled back into bed without a word.

“Was it the smoke alarm?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he mumbled, clearly ready to resume his slumber.

“What did you do?”

“I took out the batteries.”

“What?” I was now more awake. “But what if something’s burning?”

On Writing Slowly

Frowning over every word.

I’m an incredibly slow writer. How slow? Well, there was five minutes of keyboard silence between the completion of that first sentence (“I’m an incredibly slow writer.”) and the arrival of the second one (“How slow?”). And that’s fast for me.

Now you know why I blog so seldom. (Another break while I check my dictionary to see if one blogs seldom or seldomly. Turns out “seldom” is both adverb and adjective. How nice to have that question settled. Another minute while I meditate on that and on the always reliable pleasures of the dictionary.)

This slow thinking coupled with obsessiveness is also why, after seven years of not-exactly-unrelenting-but-pretty-sustained work, my book manuscript is only now crawling toward completion.

Then there’s the research.