Melon is salted, then buried in the lees left over from brewing sake. Cucumber, watermelon and ginger go the same way. Not once, either. When the lees have taken up flavour and gone tired, the vegetable is lifted out and moved into a fresh batch, and that transfer happens again and again.

Done the old way it takes four years, or ten, or more than ten. Each change of lees darkens the flesh a little further, until what comes out at the end is nearly black. The amber-coloured jars in shops today have simply not been left long enough to get there.

Wooden tablets excavated at the old capital of Heijo-kyo record melon and aubergine pickled in lees, arriving there as tribute goods, listed by name. So the thing itself is more than twelve hundred years old. The word narazuke is much younger: its earliest appearance is in a Muromachi-period household record, where it is noted as a souvenir from Uji.

In the Edo period a physician in the Nakasuji district of Nara began selling white melon pickled this way under that name, and ended up as a purveyor to the shogunate. Which is the interesting part. The object had existed for a millennium and sold moderately. It was the name that made it a business.