Auntie May's Savory Egg Custard

hen Auntie May returned from a trip to Kyoto last spring she said the cherry blossom, the reason for the invitation to visit, wasn't so very much more wonderful than the cherry blossom in Germany or in France and not really worth the trip. But she raved about an only-just-set egg custard with mussels and other seafood she got as a starter in a tempura bar in downtown Kyoto.

Now that the days are getting shorter and the barbecue has been put away for the winter and it's time for proper indoor cooking again, Auntie May and I decided to experiment and see if we could reconstruct that eggy delight.

After some searching in our many cookery cooks, we discovered a recipe for a savory egg custard in Ken Hom's Chinese Cookery. Hom's version had crab in it, which we can't get at any local fish shop and it used chicken stock, which we didn't think was quite what we wanted. So we set to work and experimented.

We used the basic combination recommended by Hom of 4 eggs mixed with 300ml (10 fluid ounces) of liquid but we made our stock from dried shitake mushrooms, a chunk of fresh ginger, onion, garlic plus a slither of lemon peel, a dash of Mirin (a Japanese seasoning made from rice wine or sake), a teaspoon of sesame oil. We started with 500ml of water and cooked the liquid down to 300ml. We then added a tablespoon of rice wine (as recommended by Hom). We tried soy sauce in the mixture but this made the custard an ugly dark color so we don't recommend it.

For fish, we bought smoked mackerel which combined very well with the egg. You only need about a desertspoonful per person.

We mixed 4 eggs together with the 300 ml of stock and one tablespoon of rice wine (sherry was okay as a substitute when we tried that instead), added the flaked fish and poured the mixture into 4 smallish cups (the size of a standard American measuring cup). We covered the cups with aluminum foil since we didn't have beautiful Oriental cups with lids.

Then we steamed the cups over gently boiling water for 18 minutes (Hom recommended 25 minutes but we found that too long) and were rewarded with gently set, shining perfect savory egg custard.

We tried steaming in a steam oven and this worked fine, but we acually preferred to place our cups in a Chinese bamboo steamer in a wok with gently boiling water in the bottom beneath the bamboo. This is fiddlier, you have to keep a pot or kettle of boiling water at the ready to top up the wok, but it felt more authentic and we thought it tasted better.

Note: we kept the lid on the wok during the steaming process.

Now we're ready to tackle the tempura ...