Sweet & Sour
No, I’m not talking about the deep-fried nuggets of mystery meat glazed with an amalgamation of ketchup, chili sauce, plum sauce, sugar, and lemon juice to play volleyball with your tastebuds. This time of year there is only one thing on my mind when someone refers to sweet and sour—CHERRIES!
We are in the midst of one of my favorite fruit seasons where memories are as sweet as the fruit itself. Cherries remind me of afternoons at Uncle Ollie and Aunt Betty’s Adams County orchard picking fruit by the bucket for Mom to pit, can, and freeze. Back then the chore was done with tiny, sharpened paring knives. Now I have a handy dandy gadget that pops out the pits with the press of a lever.
As a kid I didn’t much notice the difference in cultivars, but the colors of the fruit are as sticky in my memory as the juice on my hands after cleaning and stoning my stash for the coming winter brought home from market. I know now they were Bings and Rainiers. I’m betting Mom held back the Montmorencies knowing her kids would spit out the sour fruits all over the back of the car. Dad was forever reminding us not to eat too many or we would die like President Taylor.
Who knows if it was all the cherries he ate on his walk back to the White House after a Fourth of July picnic in 1850. There is some truth to the toxicity of cherry pits as well as that of other species of stone fruits (peaches, plums, apricots) as they all contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic compound in the pits which gets converted to cyanide in the human digestive tract. But you’ll have to eat several crushed pits for that to occur which would be akin to chewing a rock. You’d more likely break a molar than the pit.
There are other nuances between sweet and sour cherries besides their flavors. Sweet cherries are larger in size with thick pulp. They are shaped more like a heart with pronounced cleavage whereas sour cherries are rounder and squishier to the touch. However, sour cherries hold up much better to cooking (think pie!) than the sweet varieties which have a reputation for turning to mush. Personally, I like to mix sweet and sour cherries in my pie so the mushiness fills in all the spaces between the fruits that hold their shape.
Unlike most fruits that started off with wild cultivars selectively bred from native plants for increased sugars, sweet cherries are the original. While the trees and fruit are practically identical in shape and size, Prunus avium is the wild cherry from which all sweet cherries come from, including Black cherries that exhibit the boldest traditional cherry flavor. Sour cherries are they hybrid between native sweet cherries and European Dwarf Cherries, Prunus fructiosa, an ornamental shrub used for soil stabilization.
Sweet Cherries you typically find at the farmers market include Rainier, Bing, and Lambert. Rainiers are the sweetest and easy to spot with their peach color with a red blush and cream-colored flesh. They were developed back in the 1950’s at Washington State University. Bing and Lambert cherries are both considered black cherries due to the deep burgundy color of the fruits.
The sour cherry familiar to most are Morello cherries which is actually an entire family of varieties that include Balaton, Heimanns Konservenweishsel, Fanal, Kansas Sweet, Krassa Severa, Koroser Langenstein, Northstar, and Schattenmorelle. Sour cherries gained popularity due to their later flowering date than sweet cherries making them a more reliable crop as the tender flowers are safer from late frosts. The variety of sour cherry you’re most likely to encounter at the market is Montmorency. This variety is the most popular sour cherry grown commercially in the United States.
Humans aren’t the only ones to enjoy the bounty of cherry season. It’s estimated that approximately 30% of all sweet cherry crops are lost to birds. Can you blame them? Cherry trees are also susceptible to a number of diseases and insects. Think about it—sugar, heat, and moisture. Those family cherry picking sessions also included someone inevitably getting stung by a bee.
This year has a been a good year for cherries so stock up. I know I’ll put up several quarts as well as freeze a few bags. And contrary to that negative Nelly article in the Washington Post last week, pie—especially cherry pie—never went out of style.