Though nearly 120 years old, this wild potato bread appears not inedible; a good soak in water and some heating in the oven or frying pan would render it ready to eat, as one does with freeze-dried bread. Indeed, it appears similar to today’s muninimo (alternately, potcheimo), an Ainu dried pancake made from potatoes that have fermented in storage under the snow during winter. (‘Munin’ means ‘to rot/ferment’ in Ainu; ‘imo’ is Japanese for ‘potato’.) The potatoes are processed in the warm months, first by peeling their skins off and mashing them, and then through repeated soaking and draining in water, have their impurities removed while retaining their starch. Once most of the liquid has drained off the starch, it is then shaped into round discs, often with holes in the middle - like these museum pieces - for them to be tied together and hung out to dry. The dried potato pancakes can be stored indefinitely, to be consumed as needed. They are the ultimate preserved food for lean times and emergencies or, indeed, for war rations. Muninimo today, however, are made not from wild but from farmed potatoes. Potato farming was introduced to Hokkaido, and forced on the Ainu, only late in the 19th century, when potato was seen as a better alternative to rice, which was difficult to grow in the cold and dry region. It became a successful crop, so much so that Hokkaido now grows 80 percent of all the potatoes in Japan, providing most of today’s supply of the starch food to Japanese, as well as Ainu.
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