Sakura-yu is this: take half-open, double layered cherry blossoms with their stems, preserve them with ume vinegar and salt. Place one or two in a cup and pour in some boiling water. Then drink it. You can eat the flowers too, though I don't know if it's uncouth to do so.
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| One way to spell sakura-yu. Google Translate calls this "infusion of salted cherry blossoms". |
(In the interest of total honesty, there's some other definitions -- at least one book that says sakura-yu is made with cherry leaves, and two definitions make it sound like you salt the water separately. At least one refers to the blossoms as having been pickled). But most people say that the drink uses salted cherry blossoms, so for now the majority wins.)
I've seen pictures and it can look very pretty -- imagine a pink flower (some pictures show paler pinks than others) as it floats underwater.
See, I told you it was pretty.
Sakura-yu is supposed to be a smidge in the pink direction (which I didn't realize when I made that picture), and since I don't know how to make blue-pink in MS Paint yet, you'll just have to imagine the water's tinted.
What's it taste like? I've seen it described as slightly sweet in at least one book, but I've found three places that say it's salty (and one place says its a bit salty and sour). A recurring word is "refreshing". Probably depends on the how the flower was preserved, as well as the person -- the person's taste, I mean. Probably.
Here's a video that has some captions but doesn't have a lot of actual spoken dialogue. In it, a man makes sakura-yu from scratch. It's kinda funny, and you get to see some nice views of nature and such.
Like various foods and drinks around the world, people have attached symbolism to sakura-yu. You drink it for occasions like weddings, o-miai (a meeting between two people who might want to marry) and betrothals (how common is this in Japan?) One place says it's drunk instead of tea at weddings -- as the book was on Shinto, the author was talking about Shinto weddings, I guess. Suppose I could have poked around to get at the context, but I didn't!
People also drink sakura-yu during springtime as a way of saying "hey, it's spring!" Like here with ice cream, lemonade and barbecue in summer and pumpkin or apple pie-flavored everything starting in fall. To which peppermint-flavored everything is added in winter. (Hey, do we even have any foods for spring? Hmm, I'd never thought about that before...macaroni salad, perhaps.)
Why is it drunk at these times? More than once I've read it's because the cherry's got some auspicious symbolism. It's clearer than tea, which in the context of a wedding transmutes into the couple having a clear (not cloudy) marriage.
It also would be bad to serve tea at a wedding because the tea would make the wedding a joke (it's symbolism does this). I really have no idea with that one.
For some East meets West human interest, and to show you how long sakura-yu has been a commercial product, lemme show you this travelogue written by one Benjamin Robbins Curtis:
"We sit down at one of the many little tables covered with awnings, which are scattered over the summit of the hill, and are served with a most refreshing drink -- a fragrant sort of tea made from cherry-blossoms, called sakura-yu. Our waitress...serves the tea in little cups, wishes us all a polite good morning, and then retires to superintend the manufacture of more sakura-yu."
That, along with the rest of the book, was published in 1876. S'right, that was nearly 140 years ago. It was the reign of emperor Meiji, and princess Kazunomiya would still be alive until the next year.
Other than making it at home (Amazon sells salted cherry blossoms, if you're wondering), you can also get it at certain food establishments -- don't ask me what kind, I haven't found out in particular yet. All I know for sure is that its supposed to be offered as part of eating kuriimu anmitsu at a place in Tokyo named Takemura.
References:
Coming soon!
