Slowly, Sour Cherries

Everything, not just the corn, is a little behind this year. In some ways, that’s been good. The lettuce, always sensational early summer but usually starting to lose its cool-weather cool by early July, is having an amazing run. We’re talking perfect heads of Boston lettuce 15” in diameter. Now that’s what I call salad days.

Many of the berries are not faring so well. The fruit lady is having a bad season so far. She lost all her blackberry plants—total death—in the winter storms. One of the spring storms—the wind, mostly—flattened her raspberries and the crop has been sparse (although when she’s managed to pick some, they’ve been good). She is hopeful about the blueberries: they are not ready yet, but she tastes them as they grow and she thinks they are going to be good. The Montmorency cherries are not ready either—those prized and fleeting gems I wait for each year, sometimes picking my own at the fruit lady’s farm so as not to miss them—but some of the newer varieties, like the Balatons, are coming in. While I consider them on a par with, say, skim milk compared to whole, they will do in a pinch.

So I got some cherries from Young Farm last week because I was charged with bringing dessert to a friend’s house for dinner, and I wanted to bring a pie. When I started making it, I could see they were a little under-ripe, and they tasted a little “pale”—the best way to describe a cherry that has had too much rain and isn’t, well, a Montmorency. 

So the pie looks well enough, right? Well, as I said to my friends when I carried it in and everyone started exclaiming, “is that a sour cherry pie?!” : don’t get too excited. I knew it wasn’t going to be great, as in, well, Montmorency great.  So I made the crust extra-good (by that, I mean I did a high butter/lard to flour ratio). And I made a back-up dessert. I had some blueberries from New Jersey—and I can tell you, New Jersey blueberries are a very good substitute when local ones are not in—and had bought some currants from the fruit lady, which were nice. I made a little blueberry and currant crisp, and brought some of the great local heavy cream for that, and some of Gray’s vanilla ice cream for the pie. Cream is a cook's cure-all.

 

Both were fine, and as expected. I await the call from the fruit lady’s husband, telling me the Montmorencies from their 80+ year old tree are in.  And then, we’ll have my idea of a pie.

  

Sour Cherry Pie

The recipe is here, in a 2007 post. If your cherries are not perfectly ripe, you can do what I did: up your fat to flour ratio; add a little more lemon and a little maple syrup (compensating for the added liquid with a bit more cornstarch); add some spice, such as cardamom, which I generally prefer not to put in cherry pie when cherries are great because I like it pure. 

That Sour Cherry Season

     
The sour cherries are gone now—for the second time. It was an odd cherry season, puzzling everyone, including the farmers. You’ve heard me talk about how fleeting a gift  sour cherries are, coming in right around the 4^th of July for perhaps two weeks, then over until the next year. This year, the cherries, like everything else, were late. They had suffered from the heavy spring rain, and the birds. The bird problem was compounded this year by the tough winter, which had two disastrous effects on the cherries: farmers didn’t bother to net the trees because they didn’t expect much, and the birds were ravenous.
So at conventional-wisdom cherry time, the cherries were sparse and water-laden. Working with the farmer to pick from my favorite old Montmorency tree, he instructed me to pull them off with stems intact—not the normal procedure—so that they wouldn’t absorb yet more water through where the stem had been when they were washed. The cherries had been left on the tree too long—again, the assumption that they were not as good as usual and that, after the winter, they were not ready—but they turned out to be overripe as well as waterlogged from the rain. Down the road at Young Farm, they got only a few boxes off five trees.
Then something strange happened. The weather got nice—dryer, sunnier—and the cherries came back. A second (or maybe just the “real”) crop. These were primarily from the newer and infinitely less desirable hybrid trees, but still: fruit with some of the characteristics of the old sour cherries. For the first time that I can ever recall, there were sour cherries of any kind well past the middle of July.
Naturally the first priority of the season is to make a pie. My first one, made with those waterlogged cherries, was pretty enough, but not so good, at least by the standards of someone in the know. I always make some sort of preserve, perhaps the most special kind you can make (homemade strawberry being a close second as irreplicable on a commercial scale). This year, when I am flying rather than driving back to my academic-year home and am traveling light, I decided to make something versatile that could be used up by the time I left. No problem.
Cherry-Cherry Preserves
This should be cooked a little thicker than usual (my usual, at least, which is fluid) so you can use it as a garnish for cheese, meats, or sandwiches. Makes 3-4pints.
3 c pitted sour cherries
1 heaping cup supersweet yellow cherry tomatoes
2 ½ c sugar
½ c brown sugar
2 tea lemon juice
1 tea vanilla
¼ tea Aleppo pepper or red pepper flakes
Pinch salt
Blanch the cherry tomatoes in boiling water for 30 seconds; slip the skins off with your fingers or remove them with a sharp knife.
Put the cherry tomatoes, cherries, sugars, and lemon juice in a 3 qt pot and bring to a boil. Cook, skimming the white foam, until it sheets from the spoon. Add the vanilla, pepper, and salt. Cook for a minute or two longer, and remove from the heat. It should be clear. Divide among sterilized jars and cover with lids and loosely fitted rings. When cool, tighten the rings and store in the refrigerator or freezer. Bring to room temperature before serving.

    

Pickin’ Time I: Sour Cherries

 

           

I got a call around 8:00 on the Fourth of July. It was Dick Hart, the fruit lady’s husband, asking if I wanted to come pick cherries. In my sour-cherry-obsessed world, this is what is known as a rhetorical question (of course I want to pick!). He told me that he and his wife had picked about 8 quarts the night before, pitted, and frozen them. Best to get them before the birds carried them all away (he hadn’t put up a net this year). Why didn’t I come over around 9:30? Whatever you say.

An already perfect Fourth had become more perfect still. Arriving at the farm, we had the usual discussion on the treacherous subject of how much I wanted. I had learned well that underbidding was safest. A quart was expected, three would be seen as pushy. Would two quarts be all right? As it turned out, yes and then some. While dropping my pickings into my can on a string, Dick brought me some quart baskets, and encouraged me to pile them high. I ended up with about 5 pounds, or two and half quarts, plus an overflowing cup of currants, for $13.00.

An embarrassment of riches is its own kind of quandary. What to make? It was hot, hot, hot, not the best day for preserving, but I would have to be a fool not to make my favorite sour cherry preserves, which sustain me through the winter with not only memories of summer in Little Compton but also a taste pleasure, spooned over good vanilla ice cream, that is a kind of happiness. They took forever to gel in that relentless humidity, but they eventually did, and they are wonderful. I also decided to make the other sour-cherry preserve that I really like to have on hand, some pickled sweet-sour cherries; they are marinating away as we speak, the vinegar having been poured off and bottled. I had been fortunate enough to have  had a goodly share of cherry pie, thanks primarily to Anne, over several days, so thought I’d do something different. I settled on a sour cherry upside-down cake, a kind of experiment. It came out pretty well.

That about did it for my pickings. But when I was leaving the Hart Farm that day, Mr. Hart suggested that there might be more—that they would see how they went after he and his wife and some other unnamed person got some, and that we might divide up what remained. When the call comes, I’ll be ready.

 

Sour Cherry Upside-Down Cake

Upside-down cake is best served while it is still warm from the oven. It can be reheated briefly in the microwave if there is any left over. You can, of course, make this with almost any other fruit. Serves 9 (squares) or 8 (wedges).

For the caramel layer

3 T unsalted butter
¾ cup firmly packed light brown sugar
¼ tea cardamom

Generous pint of pitted sour cherries

For the cake

4 T unsalted butter
4 T lard
¾ cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 tea vanilla
1 ½ cups a-p flour
1 ½ tea baking powder
¼ tea salt
½ cup buttermilk

Heavy cream or ice cream for serving

 

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Lightly spray an 8” square or 9” cake pan with Pam. Place the 3 T butter, the brown sugar, and the cardamom in the pan on the stove. Melt, stirring together, until the mixture just bubbles. Remove from the heat. While it cools, make the cake batter.

Cream the butter, lard, and sugar; beat in the eggs and vanilla with a wooden spoon. Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt, and add to the creamed mixture alternately with the buttermilk, beginning and ending with the flour mixture and stirring until just combined.

Arrange the cherries, pitted side up (good side down) very close together on the caramel (it may be firm—that is OK). If you use a square pan, arrange them all around the outside edges, then work your way into the center in smaller squares; if you use a round pan, arrange them in concentric circles.

Scrape the batter over the cherries, smoothing it gently and evenly into the corners and along the surface. Bake for about 45 minutes. It will be golden brown; the sides will begin to pull away from the pan; and the center will spring back to your touch. Remove and cool on a rack for 15-20 minutes.

Cover the pan with a platter or plate larger than pan and, grasping both firmly with potholders or a towel, turn over quickly and confidently. Serve immediately with good, unhomogenized heavy cream poured over, or with vanilla ice cream.

 

      

Sour Cherries and Currants: Glowing, Glowing, Gone

They are the precious jewels of summer. Sparkling, transparent, rare and ruby-red, they’re the gemstones of July: sour cherries and red currants. They literally glow from the side of the road—there’s no mistaking them for raspberries, even from a distance—and then they’re gone. One week, two weeks, three if it’s a very good year.

They’re scarce as well as short-seasoned, too, making them all the more prized. Only a few varieties of sour cherry are generally grown in the United States today, principally Montmorency, in contrast to scores of cultivars only 50 or 60 years ago. Both sour cherries and red currants are highly perishable, sometimes sticky-oily to the touch, moisture-laden, and medium-soft (in contrast to the firm eating cherry), and while currants sometimes appear in conventional markets here (a fortune for a tiny ¼ cup, mere tablespoons), sour cherries never do. The commercial crop of sour cherries, grown primarily in Michigan, is raised for processing, packed in water or syrup. Pity, because a canned sour cherry is a faint sister to a fresh—and has added food coloring, as well. This leaves us searching, waiting by the side of the road, where a few farmers or local residents, most with old trees, pick them and sometimes share them with us, supplicants for a quart for cherry pie. And search you must, and make your needs known: believing there’s no demand for them, some country people with old trees don’t even bother to tend or pick them anymore. (Haying seems to coincide with the appearance of the cherries, I’ve noticed; if you see mowing and bailing going on, it’s time to look for cherries). Currants too are sometimes left unpicked because, well, they’re a pain to clean —all twiggy and tangly—and bunches and bunches yield only miniscule amounts (hence the price when you do find them in a market). They also have tiny seeds which, somewhere along the way, Someone decided that people don’t like, aiding their disappearance from the market despite their being a hardy and relatively easy crop to grow. I once was so desperate for currants that I told an elderly couple whom I knew had some among their other berries that I would just buy the branches, and clean them myself, which I did.

One consequence of this scarcity is that many people don’t even know what these fresh fruits are anymore, they’ve been absent from standard use for so long (Yet they’re both all over Europe! The first time I went to Paris, in the ‘70s, I was amazed to see the glowing little boxes of currants and cherries lined up like infantry along rue Moffetard). The other day, when picking up sour cherries and currants, which sat neglected alongside the raspberries everyone else was buying (thank goodness), a woman of around 70 said to me as I picked them up, “And what are those?” This is pretty surprising, especially for sour cherries, because they are in fact the fruit that defines our notions of the color and the taste of “cherry.” Think about it: a nearly black bing cherry is not the taste of “cherry” as in cherry cough drops or cherry cola, or the color of cherry lipstick, is it? Sour cherries are where all cherry-flavored and colored things, all things cerise, come from. One look, and taste, tells all. Currants too come in red and black, and likewise have different tastes and textures (pink or white currants, also very pretty and still scarcer, are similar to red). Red currants have a bright, snappy-tart, sweet-acid taste.

Both sour cherries and red currants make quintessential summer pies and preserves, primarily for their unique vibrant tastes that shout “Fruit!” and their made-in-heaven match with a good flaky crust. Red currants have the additional benefit of being high in pectin, making it a classic for jelly (which also deals with “the problem” of the seeds); preserves made with sour cherries will need an acid such as lemon or need to be combined with a higher-pectin fruit.

Here is a straightforward recipe for a cherry pie; a currant meringue pie or summer pudding; and sour cherry-currant preserves, the best of both worlds. As for freezing either sour cherries or currants, even in syrup? The texture and color changes render them inferior for pie or other relatively unadorned uses, such as a topping for ice cream. But frozen cherries in a light syrup are serviceable for cooked sauces, smoothies, and the like—should you be so lucky to find enough to freeze. In any case, you’re better off making jam and freezing that; it actually improves with storage.

To pit sour cherries: Using the nail of your thumb (my preferred tool) or the looped end of a small trussing skewer (don’t even think about buying a “cherry pitter”), pry the pit from the stem end; also pull away any bruised areas. Do this over a bowl to catch the juice.

Sour Cherry Pie

They’re not called “pie cherries” for nothing: here you find their true calling. Most sour cherry pie recipes call for almond extract, which, even when it is pure and natural, I don’t particularly like. I use best-quality 100% vanilla extract, a soul-mate with cherries. Many recipes also call for tapioca, which I reject. Like blueberry pie, you don’t want this too gummy or too gelatinous, but getting the perfect balance between fluid and gel is tricky. With experimentation, I’ve settled on a combination of flour and cornstarch for thickener. The fruit itself is a big factor, so don’t despair if your pie is a little runnier than you like; far better than stiff and rubbery. Serves 6.

Crust

2 cups flour
¾ tea salt
6 T cold unsalted butter
4 T lard or shortening
5-6 T ice water

In a food processor, pulse flour and salt. Drop in cold butter, and pulse a few times until pea-sized; drop in lard, and pulse again a few times until mixture is coarse and crumbly, with a few larger pieces of fat still visible. Through the feed tube, add 3 T ice water all at once with the motor running, then add remaining water, a tablespoon at a time, pulsing only until the dough comes together into a ball. Remove, divide and shape gently into two discs, and refrigerate while you make the filling, or overnight.

Filling

5-6 cups fresh sour cherries, pitted
scant 1 ¼ c sugar
1 T lemon juice
1 tea vanilla
2 T flour
2 T cornstarch
2 T unsalted butter

Heat oven to 400 F. Gently mix the pitted cherries, sugar, lemon juice, vanilla, and flour and cornstarch in a large bowl. It will make a lot of juicy liquid, even with the starch. Remove pastry and roll out to about 12-13”; fit one loosely into a 9” pie plate, and cut the other into ½” strips with a pastry wheel or sharp knife (you can use a ruler, but don’t bother unless you are entering a contest). Pour the filling into the pie plate and dot with the 2 T butter. Working from the center, weave the strips into a lattice; I lay all the “vertical” strips, starting with the center one, then weave outward in two directions from the center of the pie. Trim the overhang of both pastry layers to within an inch of the plate rim; tuck them under (to sit on top of the rim), and crimp. Chill the unbaked pie about 10 minutes, then bake in the preheated oven for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to 375 and bake another 30-40 minutes, until crust is golden and the juices boil up and begin to gel. Let cool completely before cutting or you will have a river of juice!! Vanilla ice cream is nice.

Currant Pie

As in the photos, you can also bake this in small blind-baked tartlet shells or in ramekins, and serve it as an old-fashioned summer pudding. This makes an 8” pie; you can use the above crust, dividing it accordingly and freezing the rest for a larger pie. Making this with all currants is equally fabulous, but because 3 cups of currants are not always that easy to find, I often combine them with raspberries, and that is how I’ve written this down. It is adapted from a very sketchy, somewhat different one handwritten in pencil in the “Notes” section in the back of one of the old cookbooks I collect, dated 1939. I’ve made a number of changes to proportions, and added my favorite spice, cardamom. Serves 4.

1 ½ cups red currants
1 cup raspberries
¾ cup sugar
2 T flour
1 T cornstarch
1/4 tea cardamom
pinch of salt
2 egg yolks
2 T water

2 egg whites
1 T sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Gently mix the currants and raspberries with the sugar, flour, cornstarch, and cardamom. Lightly beat the egg yolks with the water and stir it into the berries, blending well. Pour it into buttered ramekins or a partially blind-baked crust (8-12 min at 425 F, cooled). Bake the filling 15 minutes; remove to a rack, and reduce the oven to 325 F. Beat the egg whites with a tablespoon of sugar until it forms stiff peaks but is still moist and shiny; spoon it over the top of the still-warm filling, spreading it to touch the crust or the sides of the ramekins. Bake another 15 minutes at the lower heat. Cool.

Sour Cherry-Currant Preserves

Currants, which are high in pectin, add both flavor and body to this jam. I first made this years ago, when I had cherries and not enough currants to do anything else with. A nice outcome. With or without currants (add lemon, if not), sour cherry jam is special. In addition to spreading it on toast, it is excellent stirred into European-style plain yogurt or vanilla ice cream, and served with cheese and meats, particularly on sandwiches. Makes 2 8-oz jars plus a little extra.

1 cup fresh currants, stemmed
¼ cup sugar
¼ cup water

2 ½ cups pitted sour cherries (about 3 cups before pitting)
2 cups sugar
pinch salt
5” piece fresh stick cinnamon, broken in half

8-10 cherry pits, cracked, and kernels removed

In a small saucepan bring currants and the ¼ cup each of sugar and water to a boil; cook a few minutes, until the fruit breaks down into a mush. Line a measuring cup with a double layer of cheesecloth, and pour the currant mixture in; twist the ends (do not squeeze the contents or the juice may become cloudy) and latch them over the handle, allowing the juice to drain into the cup and keeping it above the liquid. This should yield about ½ cup.

Pit the sour cherries, reserving some pits to dry. Put the cherries in a 3-qt slope-sided pan with the remaining sugar and the salt and cinnamon. Bring to a rolling boil, then reduce heat just a bit and boil, skimming only the true foam from around the edges, for about 12 minutes or until it sheets off the spoon. Remove from the heat, pour into clean jars, and add a few kernels to each. Seal. (To crack cherry pits, wipe off any remaining pulp, and put them in a small baggie. Crack gently, so as not to smash the kernel itself, and separate the kernels from their shells; discard the shells.)