A Kibi dango (吉備団子, きびだんご, "Kibi Province dumpling"), is a type of wagashi sweet or snack with an eponymous reference to Kibi-no-kuni, an old province roughly coincident with today's Okayama Prefecture. It is made by forming gyūhi, a sort of soft mochi, into flat round cakes.[1][2][3] Glutinous rice, starch, syrup and sugar are the basic ingredients.[1] It is manufactured by some fifteen confectioners based in Okayama City.[4] While perhaps originally made from kibi (proso millet),[5] the modern recipe uses little or no millet,[a] and substantively differs from kibi dango (黍団子, "millet dumpling") of yore, famous from the Japanese heroic folk tale of Momotarō or "Peach Boy"; nevertheless, "Kibi dango" continues to be represented as being the same as the folk hero Peach Boy's dumpling.[6]
The simplistic, and widely disseminated notion regarding its invention is that it was developed in the early Ansei era (ca. 1856) by the confectioner Kōeidō,[2][3] but a local historian has traced a more elaborate multi-phased history in which the founding of this wagashi shop and the development of the modern recipe is pushed to a number of years later. Some hypotheses trace its pre-history to the dumpling (or some other food item) served at the Kibitsu Shrine in Okayama.
The resident deity of this shrine, Kibitsuhiko, is a legendary ogre-slayer, claimed to be the true identity of Momotarō, especially by Okayama locals. The theory originated in the 1930s, and since then there has been concerted effort in the region to promote the folk hero Momotarō as a local of Kibi Province, and his dumplings as "Kibi dango" by default.[7]
- ^ a b Kahara (2004), p. 41
- ^ a b Shinmura (1991), Kojien dictionary (in Japanese)
- ^ a b Cite error: The named reference
nihondaihyakkazenshowas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Kahara (2004), p. 42, as of its writing.
- ^ Nishikawa, Gorō [西川五郎]; Ōi, Jisaburō [大井次三郎] (1965), "kibi" きび, Heibonsha's world encyclopedia (in Japanese), vol. 5, p. 694
- ^ Kahara (2004), p. 43: "When used to refer to a local specialty of Okayama, [K]ibi-dango has always meant both millet dumplings of the Momotaro story and a dumpling of the Kibi region. In Japanese language, words like this are often made from two homonymic words."
- ^ Kahara (2004)
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