This ume-shiso spaghetti glistens with butter

This punchy Japanese spaghetti is tart with pickled plum paste, rich with butter and fragrant with the citrusy-minty herb shiso. Japanese pickled plums (ume) have a distinctive sour-fruity-salty flavor, so intense they’re puckering. The high-impact umami is an excellent match for butter, which helps give the sauce its glistening creaminess. The recipe is inspired by a version once served at Masayuki Ishikawa’s unconventional Sawtelle Kitchen, a tiny house of a French Japanese restaurant on Sawtelle Boulevard. The handwritten menu always included the fan-favorite ume-shiso spaghetti. I ate it so many times that I think I came up with a fairly close approximation. You can buy pickled plum paste at Japanese grocery stores. Or you can buy whole pickled plums, remove the pits and mash them into a paste. Because umeboshi is so salty, taste as you go.