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Vegetables from China

Melon and ginger pickled in wine lees (瓜菹, 釀瓜菹酒, 蜜薑, 藏越瓜)瓜菹

A set of 6th-century Qimin Yaoshu recipes for keeping Yue melons in wine lees. The melons are rubbed with salt and sun-dried until wrinkled, kept a few days in salted white-wine lees, then moved to strong wine lees with salt, honey and women's qu in a mud-sealed jar, where they turn soft and yellow. Ginger is kept in wine lees and finished in honey.

Fully documentedVegetables3 days

Recipe

Amounts from a sourceAmounts are the recipe's own, in Northern Wei measures (1 dan = 10 dou; 1 dou = 10 sheng), given per dan of strong wine mash.
Yue melons (越瓜), small and straightPicked with a knife so the skin is not damaged; a damaged melon rots[qmys-ws]
SaltRubbed on several times, then mixed into the lees[qmys-ws]
White-wine lees from the 4th month (四月白酒糟)[qmys-ws]
Strong wine mash (醅) after the clear wine is drawn off1 dan[qmys-ws][qmys-sk]
Salt, for the strong lees3 sheng[qmys-ws][qmys-sk]
Women's qu (女麴), sun-dried and crumbled by hand3 shengThe text calls it the yellow coat of wheat (麥黃衣)[qmys-ws][qmys-sk]
Honey3 sheng[qmys-ws][qmys-sk]
Starterwine lees plus women's qu, both added by the recipe

Total time across the recorded steps: 3 days

Start
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What changes: Starting material: small, straight Yue melons, cut from the vine with a knife

Step 1 of 5
Pick the melons without damaging the skin
Time
Not documented
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

Not documented for this step.

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

A set of 6th-century Qimin Yaoshu recipes for keeping Yue melons in wine lees. The melons are rubbed with salt and sun-dried until wrinkled, kept a few days in salted white-wine lees, then moved to strong wine lees with salt, honey and women's qu in a mud-sealed jar, where they turn soft and yellow. Ginger is kept in wine lees and finished in honey. Made in 5 steps over 3 days. The longest step, keep a few days in salted white-wine lees, takes 3 days (Jia Sixie 2026). Fructilactobacillus fructivorans, the lactic acid bacterium that dominated the lees and the finished pickle in narazuke, a related Japanese sake-lees pickle does most of the fermenting.

Key numbers
Main step3 daysReported[qmys-ws][qmys-sk]Keep a few days in salted white-wine lees

What makes this one different

Unlike the brine-pickled greens of the same chapter, the melons are dried in the sun first and then kept in wine lees with honey and women's qu.

Related ferments

Variants

  • Pickle wine for melons (釀瓜菹酒法)1 dan glutinous rice, a heaped 2 dou wheat qu and a level 1 dou women's qu, with two 5-sheng feeds of rice; salted, sun-wrinkled melons rest 3 nights in salted lees and are then put into this wine.
  • Shijing Yue melon in lees (《食經》藏越瓜法)1 dou lees to 3 sheng salt; the melons are steeped 3 nights, wiped with cloth and steeped again.
  • Xu Su's melon (徐肅藏瓜法)Salted about 10 days, wiped and dried a little, then sealed in 3 sheng each of roasted red adzuki beans and glutinous millet pounded with 3 dou good wine; keeps for years.
  • Shijing melon in rice gruel or chi (《食經》藏瓜法)Melons sealed in salted white-rice gruel (a Shu recipe); or 100 small melons with 5 sheng chi and 3 sheng salt, edible in 3 days.
  • Honeyed ginger (蜜薑法)Peeled ginger buried in 10th-month wine lees under a mud seal for 10 days, washed and put into honey.

Safety

The Shijing recipe warns that a melon must be kept whole, because a damaged one rots, and the main recipe has the melons picked with a knife so the skin is not harmed. The text gives no pH, temperature or salt limit, and no modern safety test of the recipe was found.

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

The Qimin Yaoshu quotes Cui Shi (崔寔) that melons can be put up six days after Great Heat (大暑).

  1. [qmys-ws] Jia Sixie, 齊民要術 卷第九, 作菹藏生菜法第八十八, 瓜菹法, 釀瓜菹酒法, 藏越瓜法, 徐肅藏瓜法 and 蜜薑法 (Chinese Wikisource transcription), read 2026-10archive
  2. [qmys-sk] Jia Sixie, 齊民要術 (四庫全書本) 卷09, the same passages in the Siku Quanshu edition (Chinese Wikisource), read 2026-10archive
  3. [wp-qmys] English Wikipedia, Qimin Yaoshu (completed in 544 CE, or by another account between 533 and 544 CE), read 2026-11wiki
  4. [hanshu-liang] Ban Gu, 漢書 卷二十一上 律曆志 (the volume measures, which give 10 sheng to the dou and 10 dou to the hu) (Chinese Wikisource transcription), read 2026-10-31archive
  5. [naist2025] Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Naraya Honten and Mori Narazuke 2025, 奈良漬は発酵食品だった (press release on the study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, DOI 10.1128/aem.01730-25), 21 November 2025other