Breakfast Custard

The week between Christmas and New Year's. Miya is at Brian's. The apartment is mine, completely, and the completeness is a landscape I am still mapping — the silences, the hours, the freedom that is also loneliness that is also peace that is also terrifying. I walk through the apartment at midnight and the floor creaks in places I haven't noticed before, and the creaking is the apartment talking back, saying: I am here too. We are in this together.

I made osechi preparations — the Japanese New Year's dishes — with less ambition than Fumiko but more than last year. Kuromame with the nail. Datemaki. The beginnings of ozoni. The preparations are a solo project now, no phone call to Fumiko for corrections, no corrections from anyone, just me and the recipe cards and the three years of practice since she died and the accumulated knowledge of mistakes made and adjusted and made again. The kuromame is the test. The kuromame takes two days. The kuromame, this year, is glossy and black and sweet and right. Not Fumiko-right. Jen-right. The distinction used to feel like failure. Now it feels like authorship.

I wrote for the book — three chapters done now, the third about the internment, about Tule Lake, about what it means to be third-generation Japanese American and to carry a history you didn't live but that lives in you. The chapter is difficult because the information is secondhand — Ken doesn't talk about it, Fumiko rarely talked about it, and I am writing from the perspective of a granddaughter piecing together a story from silences and recipes and the way Fumiko flinched, once, when someone at the market said "Go back to your country." The flinch. One flinch, witnessed at age eight, that I have carried for twenty-seven years. The flinch is in the chapter. The flinch is the chapter.

I submitted the third essay to the literary magazine that published the miso soup piece. The essay is about the internment and the flinch and the kabocha and the way Ken's garden is an act of reclamation — Japanese vegetables growing in Sacramento soil, three generations after the family was told this soil was not theirs. The essay is political without being polemic. The essay is food writing that is also history writing that is also grief writing, and the convergence of all three is the book I am writing, the book I have always been writing, the book that started with a bowl of miso soup at three AM.

The datemaki takes the most patience of any osechi dish — the careful tempering, the slow set, the way the egg has to be coaxed rather than forced. After two days of kuromame and the beginnings of ozoni, I found myself craving something that asked the same thing of me: stillness, attention, heat applied slowly. This breakfast custard is what I turned to on New Year’s morning, after the preparations were done and before anyone else arrived — a bowl that required me to be present, to wait, and to trust that the quiet work would hold.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 45 minutes | Total Time: 55 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

2 cups whole milk
3 large eggs
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg, plus more for topping
Boiling water, for the water bath

Instructions

Preheat oven. Heat your oven to 325°F. Place four 6-ounce ramekins in a deep baking dish or roasting pan.
Warm the milk. In a small saucepan over medium-low heat, warm the milk until steaming but not boiling, about 3–4 minutes. Remove from heat.
Whisk the base. In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, vanilla, and salt until smooth and pale, about 1 minute. Do not overbeat — you want as few bubbles as possible.
Temper the eggs. Slowly pour the warm milk into the egg mixture in a thin, steady stream, whisking constantly. Stir in the nutmeg.
Strain and pour. Pour the custard through a fine-mesh strainer into a pitcher or large measuring cup. Divide evenly among the prepared ramekins.
Set up the water bath. Carefully pour enough boiling water into the baking dish to reach halfway up the sides of the ramekins. Cover the pan loosely with foil.
Bake. Bake for 40–45 minutes, until the custards are just set at the edges but still have a slight wobble in the center when gently shaken.
Cool and serve. Remove ramekins from the water bath and let cool to room temperature, then refrigerate for at least 1 hour. Dust with a pinch of nutmeg before serving.

Nutrition (per serving)

Breakfast Custard — The Patience of a Solo Kitchen