Cherry Season Made Simpler

Photo by Sally Schneider>

Laziness and exhaustion are the motivations behind many of my culinary improvisations; the desperate need to make something good as quickly as possible causes me flaunt notions I'd previously held sacred. In past cherry seasons, for example, I'd painstakingly pit pounds of cherries to make a warm stew to spill onto vanilla ice cream or crème fraîche for me and my friends. It's akin to the inside of a cherry pie, and is magic because it is rare: few people seem to remember that fresh cherries are divine cooked quickly in a saucepan with sugar and a squeeze of lemon, and fewer are willing to pit them.

Then, the other evening, I arrived late for an impromptu collaborative dinner with friends, bearing fresh cherries for our dessert. Josh, who was masterminding the dinner and as tired from the day as I was, looked at my big bag of cherries with their leafy stems. The reality of the cherry dish hit us both at the same time. "We've got to pit these, right, Sal?" he asked.

"Yeaaaa...," I said uncertainly, daunted by the relatively easy job of pitting cherries. "No, wait. Let's just do them unpitted, stems and all and see how they are. How bad can they be?" So we did, tossing the cherries as-is into a pan with some sugar, and made an almost-instant dessert whose pits and stems added an unexpected measure of delight. You picked a cherry up by the stem with your fingers, dunked it in crème fraîche, and popped it in your mouth, working the fragrant flesh off the pit and stem. We dropped the spent leaves, pits and stems into little bowls set around the table, as you would olives pits or mussel shells. We ate the sublimely messy, almost primal dessert like children, savoring the cherries one-by-one and licking our fingers.

Throughout cherry season, Warm Fresh Cherries and Leaves, born out of desperation and desire, is the dessert we make on purpose now because it's even BETTER than the original, "kempt" version.

Warm Fresh Cherries (with Leaves)

You can make this dish with either sweet or sour cherries, adjusting the sugar upward for sour ones, and cooking down their abundant juices as necessary.

Serves 4

Photo by Sally Schneider

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