Sakura (Cherry Custard)

History

"Sakura (Cherry Custard)" appears among the omelettes and custards in the 1914 "Chinese-Japanese Cook Book" by Sara Bosse and her sister Winnifred Eaton, who wrote under the pen name Onoto Watanna. The method is simple: six fresh eggs beaten "lightly and frothily," a cupful of milk, sugar, and three tablespoonfuls of cherry syrup poured over a handful of ripe red cherries thrown into the baking pan, baked about half an hour, with more cherries set over the top afterward. The book adds that sugar is unnecessary where the cherries are sweet enough.

The dish is a baked custard given a Japanese name. In Japan, sakura — cherry blossom — is preserved in salt and used in confections and spring dishes, a tradition rooted in the country's spring rituals and aesthetics; the fresh cherries and cherry syrup here are closer to a Western compote than to anything salt-preserved. Baked egg custards likewise have a long history in European cookery, and this recipe uses that technique. Neither fact makes it a European recipe wearing a Japanese label: it is what the Eaton sisters wrote, for the readers they were writing for.

Those readers were the point. The sisters' preface addresses anti-Asian feeling directly: "There is no reason why these same dishes should not be cooked and served in any American home. When it is known how simple and clean the ingredients used to make up these Oriental dishes, the Westerner will cease to feel that natural repugnance which assails one when about to taste a strange dish of a new and strange land." The book — regarded as the first Asian cookbook published in North America — was written by two women of Chinese-British descent, Winnifred under a Japanese persona, for an American audience hostile to Chinese immigrants. Sakura sits inside that project rather than beside it.

Japanese dessert culture has its own elaborate seasonal sakura confections, among them sakuramochi, traced to the Mukōjima neighbourhood of Edo — today Tokyo — in 1717.

Ingredients

• 6 fresh eggs
• 1 cupful milk
• sugar
• 3 tablespoonfuls cherry sirup
• 1 handful ripe, plump red cherries

Instructions

1. Beat the eggs lightly and frothily until aerated.
2. Add the milk, sugar, and cherry sirup, and mix to combine.
3. Throw a handful of ripe, plump red cherries into the baking pan, and pour the egg mixture over them.
4. Bake for about half an hour in a medium oven.
5. Remove from the oven and set more cherries at intervals over the top of the dish.