Yesterday, I finally made a recipe for pickled/salt preserved cherry blossoms that I bookmarked years ago. Why did it take so long to make it? Timing!

Our American society in general is so separated from the seasonality of food. Normally even when we “cook in season”, there are usually still a few weeks to enjoy the fruits and vegetables of a local specialty. But cherry blossoms are ephemeral, fleeting and gorgeous. We’re not talking about a window of a couple months or a few weeks but a few days!

The book I got my recipe from is Preserving the Japanese Way: Traditions of Salting, Fermenting, and Pickling for the Modern Kitchen by Nancy Singleton Hachisu. It’s a very simple recipe, but can only be made when cherry trees are in the early stages of flowering. It’s amazing sometimes how quickly spring launches into its all-out growth spurt and this spring in Seattle is no exception. The majority of deciduous trees are just beginning to bud but many of the flowering trees are in full bloom.

For a recipe on how to USE these pickled cherry blossoms, I think this one for Cherry Blossom Rice balls from Just One Cookbook look pretty good!

Stay tuned for my next mini-project: analyzing cherry bloom times from Washington DC and Kyoto data records! Follow @lorenka on Twitter where I’m pretty active in the Data Vizualization community and more likely to post little art projects.

Here’s a simple bloomtime graph of cherry blossoms in Kyoto 812-2021 I found at Datagraver.com. It’s interesting to note that over the long term, the red line is relatively steady with a few bumps here and there where the bloom time was later than average. But the trend line over the past 100 years is trending earlier (global warming…)

Another chart on cherry blossom timing is from the EPA for the Washington, DC cherry trees.

**Peak Bloom Date for Cherry Trees Around Washington, D.C.’s Tidal Basin, 1921–2021**

“The exact timing of peak bloom varies from year to year, and it is largely driven by local temperatures during the winter and early spring. Many plants are sensitive to and respond to environmental cues such as when temperature reaches a certain threshold. As the Leaf and Bloom Dates indicator explains, scientists have very high confidence that recent warming trends in global climate are causing spring events such as leaf growth and flower blooms to happen earlier.”

Thanks and until next time,

Lorraine

the Punk Lady Apple

The Art and Science of Cherry Blossoms