Loveliest of fruits, the cherry. Now.

In this season of superabundance, we sometimes feel time's winged chariot urging us on.  For the most part, we do not eat blueberries, for example, except when they are available at the farmers market.  So when they come into season, we feel compelled to do justice to those blueberries.  Their season will be short.  Seasonal eating means blueberries on everything, until you fear you will turn into Roald Dahl's purple, bloated Violet Beauregarde, followed by no blueberries at all.

This year the blueberry season has gone so quickly that we are already on the tail end of it.  This is a year in which, somehow, we did not quite give the blueberry its due.


But we have honored the sweet cherry.  Cherries have a special place in our commitment to savoring each season because of A. E. Housman's poem, "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now," with which we play in our title.  We recited that poem to one another years ago when we made trip after trip to the Tidal Basin in Washington DC to see the cherry trees "hung with bloom along the bough," knowing that their beauty would not last.  It was so beautiful because so delicate and fleeting.  And so are we.  The speaker of the poem is only twenty, but he is already wise enough to reckon how few springs he has left.  Those ornamental cherries don't bear fruit.  But Housman's reminder that our own time is both short and unpredictable, and that enjoyment of the moment is therefore an urgent need, applies to the particular pleasures of the season here in Davis.  The poem concludes:

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

We are older if no wiser and cannot count on even fifty precious turns of the seasons.  So we commit ourselves to feeling that urgency.  This is an urgency that farmers feel of necessity.  When the fruit is ripe it so quickly becomes overripe.  It has to be harvested.  And then what to do with all that opulence?  This week we turned 13 pounds of Royal Blenheim apricots from Good Humus farm into jam and regretted that we had not also bought more of the dead ripe dry farmed apricots from Diane Madison of Yolo Bulb.  Dry farming--that is, not irrigating--intensifies flavor.  We'll return to this in later posts on tomatoes and melons.  Apricots are so persnickety that some years they do not make much of a showing.  They also don't ship well.  And they go from unripe to mush very quickly.  Those dry farmed apricots will be gone by next week's market.  If you want to make apricot ice cream, or pie, or jam, you have to carpe fructum.


While we've raced to keep up with blueberries and apricots, the lovely cherry, with its more leisurely season, has allowed us to wallow in its ripeness.  Perhaps you have asked yourself:  how can I eat more cherries?  The answer is to pit them.  Greed can, in this case, be a spur to labor.  We use an Italian olive pitter.  You can also use your thumb.  Some varieties are easier to pit.  Marilyn Garibaldi of Garibaldi farms advised us to use the early Burlat cherries for canning purposes and she was right.  They were meaty, juicy, and easy to pit.  We'll remember that next year and buy even more of them.  We made cherry jam from Garibaldi Farm's Burlat cherries.

We also used the Burlat cherries for David Lebowitz's candied cherries and the wonderful ice cream he puts them in. 

You can get the recipes for both the candied cherries and the ice cream here:
http://theresalwayspie.com/2011/07/18/toasted-almond-candied-cherry-ice-creamsource-the-perfect-scoop-david-lebovitznotes-sinful-top-homemade-ice-cream-to-date/

The ice cream uses roasted almonds, also available at the market, to flavor the custard base as well as to add crunch.  The ice cream is so good that we started to go through our candied cherries, which were supposed to be put by for a rainy day,  and have already made a second batch.

We also used roasted cherries in place of dried fruit in a panzanella served with Cache Creek's new breed of L'Argent chicken.  We put cherries in a salad with leftover roast duck from Cache Creek, too.  The salad was even better than the duck was the first time, duck redux so to speak.

Finally, we put a few pounds of washed but not pitted Bing cherries in the freezer.  They'll be easier to pit when we thaw them and perfect for a cobbler when cherry season is otherwise just a fond memory.