Where does Soy milk come from?
Soy milk comes from China, where people have drunk it for centuries. It is made by soaking soybeans, grinding them with water, then boiling and straining the mix, and it was a Chinese breakfast drink long before it reached Western supermarkets.
Bean liquid in old China
The Chinese name doujiang means 'bean liquid'. The word already appears in the Lun Heng, a book from about AD 82, though it may then have meant a soybean purée soup rather than a filtered drink. The soy historians William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi date the first record of soymilk, as doufujiang, to 1365. In the traditional method, soaked beans were ground on a hand-turned stone mill and the milk was filtered through cloth.
Breakfast from the street
By the 18th century street vendors were selling soymilk in China. It was drunk warm and sweetened, early in the morning or late at night, or eaten as a savoury breakfast soup, with long fried dough sticks dipped in. In the early 20th century it went into bottles, and by 1929 Shanghai factories were selling more than 1,000 bottles a day. From the 1950s it was sold like a soft drink in Hong Kong and Singapore.
Why people say Japan
Japan has its own word for it, tonyu, 'bean milk', but soymilk was never part of the traditional Japanese diet. Its earliest known mention there dates from 1895, and Japan's first commercial soymilk was bottled on a small scale in 1957. It became very popular in Japan only in the late 1970s, when Japanese makers refined new ways to remove its beany flavour. By then it had been a breakfast drink in China for centuries.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · soyinfocenter.com › soymilk1.php ↗ · soyinfocenter.com › soymilk2.php ↗ · todaysdietitian.com ↗
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