The Etymology of Edamame
Edamame (枝豆) is a transparent Japanese compound: eda (branch, stem) plus mame (bean). The name picks out the way these immature soybeans are traditionally harvested and sold — clipped with the pods still hanging on the stalk, bundled, and sold by weight. The earliest written attestation in Japanese dates to around 1275, and edamame appears in Edo-period (1603–1868) Tokyo as a popular summer street food, lightly boiled in salted water and eaten by squeezing the bean from the pod. The English word is recent: edamame entered American and British food vocabulary in the late 1980s and 1990s as Japanese restaurants spread, first as a sushi-bar appetiser and later as a freezer-aisle staple. The plant is the same species as the mature soybean (Glycine max) — edamame are simply harvested young, when the seeds are bright green and tender. The Japanese mame survives in compounds for many beans: azuki, sora-mame (broad bean), and ingen-mame (kidney bean).