Sour Cherries (With a Pancake Recipe)
Hi Besties!!
I started a newsletter Wednesday while serving jury duty*, but it’s not ready, and I am thinking a lot about cherries. I started this newsletter while flipping cherry pancakes, and I am going to finish it while eating a few of them.
I’ve been drafting a lot of posts about the natural world and thought you deserved a break from megafauna. To talk about cherries.
I love cherries! I like it as a fruit and as an artificial flavor. I don’t love Wild Cherry (™), but I’ll always pick it over artificial strawberry. I have a can of Cherry Coke and a box of black cherry Jell-O on the counter now, for a recipe I saw online from the 1950s.
[I was going to insert it here but I can't find it! Guess I'm not making it anytime soon!!]
The thing about Cherry Coke is that it also tastes like almonds, and after it was pointed out to me in my brewing class last month, all I can taste is almonds! That’s by design, because people think maraschino cherries are the only cherry flavor, and maraschino cherries, which are dyed red and packed in sugar syrup, are flavored with bitter almond oil.
I don’t mind–I like almonds!–but it’s not the same as a fountain soda with red syrup. I am not often offered the opportunity, but I had two in California, first at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank (if I lived in Los Angeles, I would take all my Hollywood meetings there too, which is allegedly what David Lynch does**) and a second at the Sonic near Joshua Tree.
I inadvertently solved my solution last weekend when I pulled out a gallon bag of sour cherries from the freezer. If I don’t know what to do with summer produce I freeze it “for the winter” and forget about it until it’s almost in season again. Last summer I froze a bag of pitted, sour cherries I bought at Union Market and a bag of pitted, sour cherries from Maryland.
When I pit the cherries myself I dumped the whole bowl into a bag, so I froze juice too, and it was easy to make a simple syrup. I drained the whole bag, separated the solids, and simmered the juice on the stove with the same about of sugar. Simple syrup is always 1:1 water and sugar.
It’s great in cold brew. It’s incredible in Coca-Cola. I know! I added sugar to Coca-Cola! (I only have one kind of orange cracker, OK?*) It sparks and soothes simultaneously. I cannot recommend the experience enough. (Monin makes a tart cherry syrup, which might be OK? Their huckleberry syrup is good and I have my eye on the tropical syrups.)
Sour cherry jam, 2013.
The thing about me is I think sour cherries are superior to all of the other cherries. I’ll eat a maraschino cherry in a sundae without question, but I will take out a grandma at the farmer’s market for sour cherries. (Black raspberries, too.) I don’t know why! I was raised that way. Walkersville is fairly rural, as are the small towns that surround it, so I grew up perched on a ladder picking my own cherries (or crouched in bushes, picking strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries). I’m an adept tree climber, so I’m sure I was probably higher off the ground than I should have, but I have a lot of fond memories of early summer mornings striving for jeweled fruit. I hoped Wikipedia would have a history of sour cherry as it has for blue raspberry, but alas, there is only dry, scientific information on international varieties. Such is life!
I had to do something with the leftover fruit, so I made a batch of pancakes and dumped the cherries into the batter. It’s made a nice breakfast, and my mom’s note at the end is true.
Here is the pancake recipe. It is from Mom's Big Book of Baking, by Lauren Chattman. It is the recipe I have used more than any other for the last several years.
1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp salt (I don't.)
2 TBL sugar
1 1/4 cups Buttermilk
1/2 cup milk
1 large egg
2 TBL butter, melted
Stir together all dry ingredients. Measure the two milks and mix in the egg. Add the melted butter--which I melt directly on the griddle on which I plan to make the pancakes--just pour it off. Mix all ingredients together until just moistened and blended. Small lumps should remain. Brown on griddle. Katherine loves any frozen leftovers.
Always your friend,
Katherine
DRIBS AND DRABS
There is a global rice shortage looming. Buy a big bag, I guess?
A PEACOCK bit a man in the Bronx this week. Neighbors are calling it Raul, and no one knows where it came from. Probably the zoo! I HOPE it’s the zoo.
I was trying to decide if I should throw caution (money!) to the wind and register for the firefly lottery in the Great Smoky Mountains. Now I am thinking I’d rather budget it out and go to Dollywood, too. I know Tennessee is not great, though, so is this a moral issue? Are we fully boycotting Florida now, I’m fine with that!
They studied the DNA of Balto for some reason and once again I would like to shout that Togo is the hero here! This episode of This Podcast Will Kill You explains why. (If you like disease ecology, I like the yellow fever episode, and the AIDS series is fantastic. Fuck Reagan!)
I started a playlist for the next time someone (of a four-year-old variety) complains that I am missed and I think it cuts a little too deeply in the feels.
*I was not picked, or even interviewed, for jury duty. They called 20 names for a one-day civil case, and they found jurors and alternates before they talked to me, which is good, because the plaintiff was a woman who was hit by a vehicle in the crosswalk, so I obviously could not serve on a jury on that case.
**What do you think it’s like to live near David Lynch? I flipped pancakes and thought about walking my imaginary dog past his yard as he brings in the mail or picks fruit from his yard and I just… it renews my desire to write a road trip comedy where he and David Byrne have to drive a convertible through the West for Some Reason.
***I popped into Bob & Betty’s because I couldn’t stop thinking about orange crackers. I also bought honey Teddy Grahams and Oreos, and we’ll talk about snacks later, I hope. Please feel free to make recommendations! A grazer is what I am!!