Edamame with Sea Salt

Use frozen edamame in pods—they're flash-frozen at peak freshness. Steam or microwave rather than boil to preserve nutrients and flavor. Toss with salt while still hot so it adheres. Serve immediately for best texture.

Edamame has one of the most precisely documented origin stories of any common snack food. The SoyInfo Center, a specialist agricultural history research institution, has traced the oldest known written reference to edamame to a letter dated July 16, 1275, written by the Japanese Buddhist monk Nichiren, in which he thanks a neighbor for leaving edamame as a gift at his gate. This single document establishes that edamame was already a recognisable and gift-worthy food in 13th-century Japan. The soybeans themselves are far older: domestication of the soybean (Glycine max) in northern China dates to approximately 5,000 BCE, and the soybean gradually spread throughout East Asia over the following millennia as one of the region's most nutritionally important crops. Edamame is soybeans harvested at the green, immature stage — before the pod dries and hardens into the yellow bean used for tofu, miso, and soy sauce. The name reflects this harvest method: in Japanese, eda means branch or stem and mame means bean, literally "branch beans" — a name that grew from the traditional practice of selling the pods still attached to the cut stalks of the plant in Japanese markets. For centuries edamame was a seasonal street food in Japan, sold by vendors at festivals and served in sake bars as a snack alongside drinks — a pairing that prefigured its later role as an American bar snack by several hundred years. Edamame reached the United States through Japanese immigrant communities and became widely familiar through the 1990s expansion of Japanese and Asian-fusion restaurants, where it appeared as a simple, healthy starter and quickly found a permanent place on menus across the country.