Refined and elegant things – A girl’s over-robe of white on white over pale violet-grey. The eggs of the spot-billed duck. Shaved ice with a sweet syrup, served in a shiny new metal bowl. A crystal rosary. Wisteria flowers. Snow on plum blossoms. An adorable little child eating strawberries.

–Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book (枕草子), circa 1000 AD

Sei Shonagon, lady-in-waiting to an Empress, living in the insular bubble of the Heian court at the height of Japanese medieval aristocracy. Me, middle-class millennial living in the age of hyperconnectivity and loneliness, (dis)information, globalization and mounting mental crises and environmental catastrophe. Separated by 7880 km and over a thousand years, by language, culture and status, we may live in worlds unrecognizable to one another, but Sei Shonagon and I nevertheless have at least one thing in common: we like to write lists.

Memorializing the beautiful, the egregious, the aggravating, the delightful and the peculiar — her diary is peppered with lists and reminiscences, at times philosophical, but more often than not trivial. Meanwhile, a glance at the kitchen cart where I store my miscellany reveals disordered stacks of index cards muddied with my tiny scrawl: recipe ideas and drafts, grocery lists, vocabulary lists and notes in Japanese, names of authors, books, songs and people, to-do lists, and snippets of prose. The contents of my brain on display, between an eyeglass case and the microwave.

Ironically, though it is Sei Shonagon who made the greater effort to keep her musings concealed, I am quite certain that my grocery lists and ingredient pairings will never be the object of memorization of hordes of Japanese junior high students. Phew.

Coming back to Sei Shonagon’s list, quoted above, of refined and elegant things, we find the first known mention of strawberries in Japanese writing. Though it undoubtedly referred to a wild variety of strawberry, it nevertheless suggests that the Japanese love of these heart-shaped berries goes back a long way.

Strawberry Nation

The strawberry as we know it–the garden strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa), was introduced to Nagasaki at the beginning of the 19th century, but remained for the rest of the century a rare, ornamental plant. Commercial production started in the early 1900s in the region surrounding Tokyo, and the popularity of the fruit rose after World War II, as greenhouses became more widespread and strawberries more affordable. Over the following decade, the Japanese developed a variety of methods of cultivation that enabled them to essentially cheat the seasons, and provide a nearly year-round supply of fresh strawberries. Today, Japan is the world’s seventh largest producer of strawberries, a feat for a country of its size. What is more, most of the bounty never crosses any borders, finding their way instead, in Japanese supermarkets, pastry shops and restaurants, and eventually, in Japanese stomachs.

Lower, Elsie E. (1882). Fragaria. U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705

A quick search for strawberry recipes on the Japanese cooking app Delish revealed a dizzying array of ways to put all of those strawberries to use, from jellies, parfaits and jams to cakes, crepes and tiramisu, and even a strawberry “kurafutii” (can you guess? Clafoutis). A number of famous hotels even hold periodical all-you-can-eat strawberry buffets, at least as much, I surmise, to fill Instagram feeds as strawberry-avid stomachs. For example, in the winter and spring of this year, the Hilton Tokyo offered a series of buffets serving its Strawberry Cats Collection, with dainty strawberry treats set amidst macarons Eiffel Towers and beret-sporting cats. If you find cats too cutesy for your taste, there was also the peculiar Strawberry & Godzilla Lunch Buffet, held by The Strings by Intercontinental Tokyo and featuring a collection of twenty different Godzilla-themed strawberry desserts to be enjoyed with free-flowing wine.

But I digress…

Perhaps the most beloved of strawberry desserts in Japan is ichigo daifuku, which takes a strawberry, coats it with a gooey layer of sweet red bean paste, and then envelops it in a cushion of heavenly mochi. The method and ingredients are quite similar to my daifuku recipe, but whereas I used coarse red bean paste then, I prefer to use smooth red bean paste, called koshian (こし餡), to mould around the strawberries.

To be honest, although the recipe is fairly straightforward, it takes a bit of practice to get the hang of assembling these pastries… elegantly. If, like me, your first batch fails to please the eye, do not despair! Mochi dough is very different to handle than the wheat-based doughs we are familiar with in the West. Try again, and make sure to read the tips I provide below the recipe.

Shonagon’s Strawberry

Shonagon muses that kids eating strawberries is a pinnacle of refinement. Perhaps the young aristocrats of medieval Japan nibbled on their fruit with an elegance unimageable today, but my experience of children and berries is a little different.

The last time I watched kids eating berries, it was the raspberries from the garden that I was offering to elementary and middle school-aged children in the weeks prior to the summer holidays. Popping the plump red fruits into their mouths, their faces lit up like Christmas trees, and the raspberries had all too soon vanished from the bowl, leaving behind red-stained fingertips and mile-wide smiles. I am not sure I would qualify the sight of this hedonic thrill as elegant and refined, as Sei Shonagon does, but it is unequivocally delightful.

Berries, however, do not need complicated accoutrements to meet my definition of refinement and elegance. An airy goat cheese, a dollop of crème fraiche, a drizzle of maple syrup or balsamic, or, if time allows, homemade anko and mochi, is all it takes to raise the berry on a pedestal. The key, I believe, is to let the sweetness and fragrance of the fruit shine, instead of overcrowding it with other flavours and sweeteners, and this recipe accomplishes this feat perfectly.

Adorable little children may never have gotten the chance to put their hands on these pillow-wrapped berries, but the big kids certainly enjoyed them!

And I hope you do too.

Joëlle

Smooth Red Bean Paste (こし餡)

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Ingredients

300g adzuki beans
5 cups water
150g dates
2 tbsp honey
1 tbsp shio koji

Instructions

Soak dates in warm water for 1 to 2 hours. Blend them in a food processor or blender with a few tablespoons of the soaking water until you have a paste. Set aside.
Place beans in a large bowl and wash them with cold water until the water runs clear. Discard any floating beans. Drain the water, and add the beans to the Instant Pot liner.
Cook for 25 minutes on high pressure, and let the pressure release naturally.
Remove the lid from the Instant Pot. If there is any foam on the surface, scoop it up with a skimmer.
Pour the contents of the Instant Pot liner through a fine sieve to drain the cooking water, and put the cooked beans back into the pot.
Set the Instant Pot to saute mode, on the low setting. Add the date paste, honey and shio koji, and mix until everything is well combined.
Keep cooking until the mixture has thickened enough that when you draw a line through it with your spatula, you should see the bottom of the pot for about 2 seconds.
Turn off the Instant Pot and remove the pot liner. Let it cool for 10-15 minutes, then pour the mixture into a food processor and blend until smooth. Do this in batches if your food processor is small, like mine.
Strain the mixture through a fine mesh sieve and discard the skins.
Let the paste cool and thicken, and then store in the fridge in an airtight container for up to a week, or in the freezer for up to a month.

Notes

Shio koji (塩麹) is a lacto-fermented mixture of rice koji (rice inoculated with aspergillus oryzae spore -- the basis for many well-know Japanese ferments such as miso, sake and soy sauce). It provides enzymes and probiotics while imparting the dish with a unique umami flavour. You can substitute sea salt, himalayan salt or fish sauce. To learn more about shio koji, how to make it at home, and how to use it in the kitchen, click here.

Nutrition

Calories

1503 cal

Carbs

330 g

Protein

62 g

Click Here For Full Nutrition, Exchanges, and My Plate Info

https://www.joellegaudet.com/2019/07/01/strawberry_daifuku/