stripped bare
She's been stripped bare, my little cherry. This hasn't been a good season. Sure, the cherries are big; at least those that set. But the fruit set was poor: too much wind, too much rain, inadequate warmth. It was the paucity of warm weather that has got them to this late point in the season.
This morello is espaliered and kept down to where I can easily pick her fruit while standing at ground level. In a good season she'll give me 10 kilograms of fruit. You can do a lot with 10 kilograms of sour cherries. You can run out of ideas! There's the stellar Syrian lahma bil karaz, lamb meatballs with a sour cherry sauce, and any number of khoresh-style equivalents. I have bottles of brandy infused with sour cherries, though none this year because I have enough and it isn't good for me to have too much. There's Polish cordial made with pure spirit: too strong, suitable for lacquer stripping or rocket propellant. Cold cherry soups, well, leave me cold.
Sour cherry jam is a favourite. But I overcooked the last batch rendering it a bit stiff and tarry so I'm now banned from making cherry jam. You can dry them, and they are brilliant in b¡tch bars. You'll have to ask me why they are called this because I probably can't say it unbidden and out loud. Oh, and they are quintessentially flat food!. Making cherries flat to dry is fiddly and tedious work: remove stone then cut into two halves. The tool nonpareil, the sine qua non of cherry stoning tools from Fowlers is an antique, no longer available and worst of all has a gape too small for the biggest, fattest morello cherries of my tree. Drying isn't happening this year!
You will have admired glacé cherries. They are beautiful, like garnets in lustre and colour. Never volunteer to make them. They must be stoned too, then simmered in sugar syrup made progessively more rich. About 17 days later they can be strained out and dried in a final step. Absolutley essential for St Cuthbert's cake, another flat food, they are just a tedious pain to make. I'm not doing that again either. Although, when you finally do strain out the cherries to dry, the residual syrup is astounding — full of all the flavour that should be in the now leached out cherries.
I don't mind if someone else makes kriek, sour cherry infused lambic beer. Been there, done that and honestly as sour beers go it was a bit of a dissapointing use of good cherries. If I was to nominate some of my fruit to make a sour beer, I'd prefer to use the prolific yields which accrue each year from the raspberries and make a framboise in preference over kriek.
Following the practice of baking clafoutis but swapping out the black cherries for morello cherries is genius; wicked. This deceptively easy recipe is seductive. That's part of the problem. No, I didn't take off all that weight just so I could put it back on eating clafoutis; delicious as it is.
Cherries aren't just sweet and these are sour off the tree. Cherry chutney is an option; except, delicious as it is, the essential cherry character gets lost in translation. Pickled cherries are a delight. But they need a delicate and balanced approach. Already sharp morellos get too sharp with conventional pickled cherry recipes intended for sweet cherries. That's more sugar or a lighter pickle. In the end, when you've eaten all the cherries there is a wonderful, fruity pickling liquor left to liven up a vinaigrette. No, I think I'm over savoury morello preserves for now.
Morello cherries freeze well, are alright conserved under vacuum in sugar syrup and you can just eat them. That's it! I'm known to eat them off the tree; perhaps too sour for some. This last hurrah of the current season's cherries are going into a simple compôte to be gulped down cold with spoons full of equally chilled homemade jersey milk yoghurt. That'll do.
So why the rush? Why not leave them all to ripen properly. There's a smell. It's unmistakable, like one fly struck sheep in a mob, you smell it before you see it: pear and cherry "slug". Once the fruit's off, the tree can be treated to stop defoliation by these annoying sawfly larvae. On top of that, now is the time to begin pruning and training. If you were paying attention you'll remember this is an espalier. They need work and now is a good time to start — while it's in leaf and still growing. Ditto for the gooseberries, blackcurrants and jostaberries — all have finished fruiting now and are up for their haircut. Green waste? Not really. Alright I'll reject the notion of feeding gooseberry prunings into the chipper. But cherry, blackcurrant and jostaberry prunings can all get shredded for mulch, add carbon to the soil, suppress weeds and conserve some of that rain in the soil. Nothing good lasts forever.
stripped bare
She's been stripped bare, my little cherry. This hasn't been a good season. Sure, the cherries are big; at least those that set. But the fruit set was poor: too much wind, too much rain, inadequate warmth. It was the paucity of warm weather that has got them to this late point in the season.
This morello is espaliered and kept down to where I can easily pick her fruit while standing at ground level. In a good season she'll give me 10 kilograms of fruit. You can do a lot with 10 kilograms of sour cherries. You can run out of ideas! There's the stellar Syrian lahma bil karaz, lamb meatballs with a sour cherry sauce, and any number of khoresh-style equivalents. I have bottles of brandy infused with sour cherries, though none this year because I have enough and it isn't good for me to have too much. There's Polish cordial made with pure spirit: too strong, suitable for lacquer stripping or rocket propellant. Cold cherry soups, well, leave me cold.
Sour cherry jam is a favourite. But I overcooked the last batch rendering it a bit stiff and tarry so I'm now banned from making cherry jam. You can dry them, and they are brilliant in b¡tch bars. You'll have to ask me why they are called this because I probably can't say it unbidden and out loud. Oh, and they are quintessentially flat food!. Making cherries flat to dry is fiddly and tedious work: remove stone then cut into two halves. The tool nonpareil, the sine qua non of cherry stoning tools from Fowlers is an antique, no longer available and worst of all has a gape too small for the biggest, fattest morello cherries of my tree. Drying isn't happening this year!
You will have admired glacé cherries. They are beautiful, like garnets in lustre and colour. Never volunteer to make them. They must be stoned too, then simmered in sugar syrup made progessively more rich. About 17 days later they can be strained out and dried in a final step. Absolutley essential for St Cuthbert's cake, another flat food, they are just a tedious pain to make. I'm not doing that again either. Although, when you finally do strain out the cherries to dry, the residual syrup is astounding — full of all the flavour that should be in the now leached out cherries.
I don't mind if someone else makes kriek, sour cherry infused lambic beer. Been there, done that and honestly as sour beers go it was a bit of a dissapointing use of good cherries. If I was to nominate some of my fruit to make a sour beer, I'd prefer to use the prolific yields which accrue each year from the raspberries and make a framboise in preference over kriek.
Following the practice of baking clafoutis but swapping out the black cherries for morello cherries is genius; wicked. This deceptively easy recipe is seductive. That's part of the problem. No, I didn't take off all that weight just so I could put it back on eating clafoutis; delicious as it is.
Cherries aren't just sweet and these are sour off the tree. Cherry chutney is an option; except, delicious as it is, the essential cherry character gets lost in translation. Pickled cherries are a delight. But they need a delicate and balanced approach. Already sharp morellos get too sharp with conventional pickled cherry recipes intended for sweet cherries. That's more sugar or a lighter pickle. In the end, when you've eaten all the cherries there is a wonderful, fruity pickling liquor left to liven up a vinaigrette. No, I think I'm over savoury morello preserves for now.
Morello cherries freeze well, are alright conserved under vacuum in sugar syrup and you can just eat them. That's it! I'm known to eat them off the tree; perhaps too sour for some. This last hurrah of the current season's cherries are going into a simple compôte to be gulped down cold with spoons full of equally chilled homemade jersey milk yoghurt. That'll do.
So why the rush? Why not leave them all to ripen properly. There's a smell. It's unmistakable, like one fly struck sheep in a mob, you smell it before you see it: pear and cherry "slug". Once the fruit's off, the tree can be treated to stop defoliation by these annoying sawfly larvae. On top of that, now is the time to begin pruning and training. If you were paying attention you'll remember this is an espalier. They need work and now is a good time to start — while it's in leaf and still growing. Ditto for the gooseberries, blackcurrants and jostaberries — all have finished fruiting now and are up for their haircut. Green waste? Not really. Alright I'll reject the notion of feeding gooseberry prunings into the chipper. But cherry, blackcurrant and jostaberry prunings can all get shredded for mulch, add carbon to the soil, suppress weeds and conserve some of that rain in the soil. Nothing good lasts forever.