Cherry on Top

Delicious Food

Our cafeteria serves delicious food. I especially like the menus they present during student camps. Today was no exception. There was spaghetti, sweet pumpkin soup, cookie & cream milk, and dongas (돈가스) Dongas is a breaded and fried pork cutlet. It is usually served with a dongas sauce. I made a joke to the cafeteria ladies asking if I could have two. They actually gave me a second dongas. I wasn’t that hungry, but I felt obligated to eat it. It was delicious, of course. I had a really lovely lunch and the cherry on top was that when I went back to my office, there were Costco cookies! One of our previous trainees had sent it. It was a great dessert.

Meaning

The cherry on top is something special or extra that was already really good. It is something that makes it even better. Sometimes you will hear, “the cherry on top of the cake”, “the cherry on the cake”, or “the icing on the cake.” They mean the same thing. These phrases can also be used sarcastically to talk about a bad situation too. If a bad situation gets worse, you could say that it is the cherry on top. Native speakers will understand that you are using the phrase hyperbolically to say that the situation got even worse.

Example (good): I went to camp and had a lot of fun. We played games, tried new technology, and ate delicious food. The cherry on top was that they gave us some parting gifts.

Example (bad): I went on an awful date last week. He was late. He was a bad conversationalist. And the cherry on top? He made me pay for dinner.

Origin

As you can probably tell by the synonymous phrase, the cherry on top of the cake, a cherry on top is an allusion to cake. Sometimes cherries are added to slices of cake to make them extra special. One of the things that seems weird to me is putting cherry tomatoes on cake. We never did that in Canada and it is so strange to have the sour flavor on a sweet dessert. But I have seen a lot of weird things on cake here. For my birthday, my school gave me a sweet potato cake with French fries on top.

For some people, a cherry on top is an allusion to ice cream sundaes. There is some disagreement about who invented the sundae but it was invented in the early 1890s. I like the story of Chester Platt. He owned a drugstore called Platt & Colt. The story is Platt’s friend, a pastor, asked for some ice cream after church on a Sunday. Platt added some cherry syrup and a candied cherry on top. Hey loved the invention and called it, “Cherry Sunday.” Over time, Sunday was changed to sundae to remove the religious implications.

In Korea, there is also a food called sundae (순대), but it is pronounced differently. It is very different from ice cream. It is a type of blood sausage made from the intestines of cows or pigs. It was traditionally made from the wild boar that were common on the peninsula. The sausages are stuff with any combination of blood, minced meat, rice, vegetables, or noodles. As it turns out, we also recently had sundae soup at our cafeteria.

Pretty please with a cherry on top

A related phrase is pretty please, with a cherry on top. You can use this to ask for something in a cute way. It feels quite aegyo (애교) to me. It can also be used to exaggerate your request, often sarcastically. I usually hear this phrase when people are asking for help. Alternatively, you could say, “Pretty please with sugar on top.”

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Resources:

http://www.thenibble.com/reviews/main/ice-cream/the-history-of-ice-cream4.asp
https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/what-are-the-origins-of-the-ice-cream-sundae/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundae_(sausage)