Maeja-cho (Plum Vinegar)

History

Maeja-cho (매자초, ᄆᆡᄌᆞ초) is the final recipe in Eumsik dimibang, closing a short vinegar coda of just three 초(醋) entries at the end of the manuscript. It is a fruit vinegar built for keeping: the maker takes omae (오매, 烏梅 — smoked, dried Prunus mume, the "black plum"), removes the seeds, steeps the fruit in the strongest vinegar, dries it in the sun, and grinds it to a fine powder that stores well; when vinegar is wanted, a little is dissolved in water. That concentrate-and-reconstitute method — a portable sour seasoning drawn from preserved plum — is documented as one of the period's fruit-vinegar techniques. Vinegar itself was a central household ferment in Joseon Korea, ranked in importance second only to jang (fermented soy paste and sauce) and often blended into chojang for the table. Korea's vinegar culture was already deep and varied: grain vinegars raised from rice, barley, and millet through nuruk sat beside fruit vinegars, and manuals from the 15th-century Sanga Yorok onward catalogue a dozen and more types. As a mid-Joseon ferment its sourness came from fruit and grain alone — no New-World ingredient enters here.

Ingredients

• doe ume plum (Japanese apricot)
• doe strong vinegar
• water

Instructions

1. Remove the pits from ume plums; soak 1 doe in 5 doe of strong vinegar.
2. Sun-dry and grind into a paste to keep.
3. At use, add a little water to reconstitute as vinegar.