How can something so sour be so sweet?

Any idea what I'm talking about, besides love? I'm speaking of cherries.
As a person who loves to cook, and loves to eat, I have an ambivalent relationship with cherries. At this time of year, just about any restaurant you go into has a cherry dessert on the menu. And I've had all of them. And I've been disappointed with each and every one of them. See, I'm not ambivalent about the TASTE of cherries: I love them. But when cherries are cooked, to my taste, they wind up tasting just like prunes, or raisins. All of the "cherrieness" is gone from them.

But I speak of SWEET cherries. And those, I reserve for eating fresh, or now, my new discovery, (thanks to Zuni), roasted. There is a second variety of cherries, that many of us just don't know about, and those are SOUR cherries. Why don't we k now about them? Well, while cherries are fragile, in general, sour cherries are extremely fragile. They are extremely soft, and extremely juicy, and under the usual conditions of handling of fruit, they're destroyed. And, when a sour cherry crop comes in, it all comes in at the same time. So, many of them , in fact most of them, are frozen, or canned, or used in the food business for the flavor or color they impart to other things. So, when you see sour cherries, or "pie cherries," as they are sometimes called, it is unusual to see them fresh. This is their season, though, the Farmers Markets are full of them, and away I go.

One of the interesting things I learned about sour cherries, many years ago, is that sour cherry trees are not self pollinating. In other words, if you have a sour cherry tree, and there isn't another one around, you will get flowers, but no fruit. Sweet cherry trees DO self pollinate, so you'll get fruit if you beat the birds to them. Cherries, be they sweet or sour , are extremely good for you, and birds know that. Farmers I have spoken to tell me that the race to get to the cherries before the birds do is a tight one. There are all kinds of techniques employed, including netting the trees as the fruit ripens, but there is always a loss to the deserving, hard working birds.

But to the fruits themselves. I LOVE making sour cherry sorbet. I will post it here in due course, but in short, all it has in it are cherries, sugar and water. And if it works, I will post a sour cherry pie recipe in a day or so. Today, however, I am posting my latest discovery for cherries: pickled sour cherries.

Yes, I have an obsessive personality, and now that I've made pickles, I'm looking at all kinds of pickling recipes. With the sour cherries in, I happened upon a recipe, by following a link in David Lebovitz's wonderful blog. Since my dear friend Keith has a birthday in a matter of days, and he has told me that cherries are his favorite fruit, I wanted to try to provide him something that he's never had before - plus a cherry pie. And, of course, since I'm now fascinated by the concept of pickling, I got to have fun, too.

This was a very easy recipe. I WILL tell you that amongst Guy and I, as of now, the jury is still out on these. True, they have been picling for all of four or five hours, and the recipe very explicitly says to wait a few days before eating them, but we tried them anyway. They have a very unique flavor, and perhaps not at all like cherries. The other thing you need to know is that the process of pickling them does leach the red color out of them, so you get a yellow looking fruit, and a dark liquid.

For a quart jar of cherries, you need a full pound of sour cherries. Don't pit them. DO cut the stems back, almost to the base of the cherry. The reason for this is simple: the stem of fruit is wood: that's tannin. Tannin extracts into alcohol, and unless you control it, like in a good wine, it is really, REALLY nasty. But you want the softer, little bit in order to give you a "handle" for getting the cherries out of the jar. Then - and I think this is the fun part, although it is a bit tedious, take a toothpick and prick each cherry two or three times, before putting it in your quart jar. You can make the brine while you're doing this. The brine is a cup of white wine vinegar (I had some chardonnay vinegar), a cup of white sugar, 2/3 cup of water, a half tablespoon of black peppercorns, and two bay leaves. Bring the sugar and the water and the vinegar to a boil, and then take it off the heat. Crush the peppercorns with the back of a knife, just a bit, and put them into the jar with the cherries, and the bay leaves. Pour the liquid over all of it, and close the jar.

The change of color is very dramatic, and you can watch it unfold over several hours. The cherries also float in the liquid. You don't want to fill the jar too full of the cherries, because if you do, you'll crush them.

From the taste I had, I could see serving these with a rich meat, like duck, or pork, or some kind of barbecue. And I think the brine is going to be wonderful in a sparkler, something like a balsamic vinegar soda.

I will report back to you on what we do with these and how they work out. This may be something we do for fun, once in a while. Try it. It sure was easy to do.