Cherry Love

It’s time to talk about cherries.

Cherries are my favorite fruit. They might even be my favorite food. I can destroy a giant bowl full of cherries without blinking and then go back for more. I have never eaten too many cherries in one sitting. I don’t think it’s possible. At the height of cherry season I have been known to eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My birthday is in the middle of June (cherry season!) and one year, my father brought me two gifts; one was a flat of cherries. I can’t remember what the other one was. But I’ll never forget the sweetness of the cherries and how I mowed my way through them with abandon.

It’s not just the flavor of cherries—the sweet, subtle crimson taste of them—but the fact that you can’t eat them mindlessly (though you can eat them fast). You have to be careful with a cherry. There is, after all, a very hard pit in the middle. Zombie-like chewing is likely to result in a broken tooth. So you eat them one by one, nibbling the flesh, drinking the juice, feeling for the pit with your tongue, spitting it out, and then gobbling the rest even while you reach for the next. There is an awareness that comes with eating cherries. They force you to slow down and enjoy them. Although my cherry pitter is one of the most useful tools I own (my family scoffed at me when I bought it but it is worth its weight in cherries, which, these days, is quite a hefty sum), I would never use it to pit the cherries that I eat out of hand. It would be a crime not to savor each one.

I don’t know if I would love cherries as much if the season were longer. (Yes.) As it is, cherries show up later and later with the first round or two in supermarkets being utterly flavorless. Last year, frost delayed the cherries even longer. We didn’t get our California cherries until July and into August, although those late cherries were divine. I kept buying pounds of them at a time, vowing to freeze some for the rest of the year and failing to do this before I ate them all.

Well, that’s not quite true. I didn’t eat them all—I made pies with some of them.

Cherry Pie. The whole conversation (by which I mean any conversation) could stop with those two words. Is there anything better than a cherry pie? Let me clarify; is there anything better than a good cherry pie? There are plenty of bad cherry pies out there just as there are plenty of not-cherries out there (I’m talking to you, maraschino).

My love of cherries and my desire to make a good cherry pie led me to try many different recipes with varying results. The thing is, there aren’t that many ways to make a cherry pie—the basic ingredients are the same. It’s how you put them together that really counts. I finally discovered a crust, filling, and process combination that worked. The key was twice-baking the bottom crust. This made the pie sturdy and resistant to sogginess while still being buttery and flaky. The cherries have a little help in the filling (a dash of kirsch among other things), but there isn’t much top crust to speak of—just enough to make something pretty.

But the secret ingredient (and this will sound extremely crunchy) is love. Love. Of cherries.

I tested out my new cherry pie a couple of years ago in the five minutes when there were actually cherries in the house that weren’t being eaten on the spot. My father, notoriously hard to please when it comes to this sort of thing, pronounced it his favorite.

Some time later, I made the same pie for my in-laws. My father-in-law, by nature abstemious, could not stop eating it. “This is the best pie I have ever had,” he told me. And he meant it. My mother-in-law and my sister-in-law felt similarly, going as far as to attempt to cajole other family members out of their slices.

Months later, in October, I asked my mother-in-law what kind of cake she wanted for her birthday the following month.

“I want that cherry pie,” she said.

“But those were fresh cherries,” I said. “There are no fresh cherries in November. Unless I go to Chile or something. They probably have fresh cherries there.”

My mother-in-law shrugged. “Yo sé que las cerezas no están en temporada, pero si realmente me amaba, irias a Chile para conseguirlas para mí,” she said.

G—my husband—started to translate but I cut him off. “Not to worry,” I said. “I understand.”

Needless to say, she got her pie. But even though I used expensive organic cherries, they were still frozen cherries (I was not, as it turned out, able to go to Chile for cherries). She loved the pie, but I was not entirely satisfied.

My sister-in-law’s birthday is next week.

The cherries can’t come soon enough. 

This is a pie I made with the very last of the season’s cherries. There weren’t quite enough so I had to supplement with some blueberries and a few raspberries. If you want the recipe, let me know in the comments and I’ll include it in an upcoming post.