To All,
All things considered, cherries are my favorite fruit, and cherry pie is my favorite food. The standard, dark red cherry that one sees in stores is the Bing cherry (PLU #4045). At Stop&Shop on 28 Jun 2015, what to my wondering eyes should appear but Rainier (or golden) cherries (PLU #4258), which I had never had. How often do I get a chance at a new cherry? I snapped them up a bag and hugged it to my breast. These cherries are expensive. Mine were on sale for $4.99 per pound. This ties them with rambutan (21 Sep 2014) for the most expensive fruit tried. My bag of cherries, pictured below, weighed 1.03 pounds, so the total cost was $5.14.
Both the Bing and the Rainier cherries are sweet cherries, which means that you can eat them raw. Pie cherries, in contrast, are tart cherries; they are too sour to eat raw. If you make a cherry pie, the number one fact that you need to know is that you use tart cherries, not sweet cherries.This was pounded into me 30 or 40 years ago when Gwen Robinson taught me to cook cherry pie. Her recipe, Cherry Pie a la Gwenie, is attached in both Word and PDF formats. Cherry pie and Celebrated Chinese Roast Pork (a recipe I received from Mei-Mei, who got it from her mother) are the only two dishes I have ever cooked that have excited the envy of my friends. The revoltingly sweet, goopy crap that stores call pie filling is an insult to pies, and you are not allowed to use pie filling if you are making Gwenie's recipe.
The Bing cherry was created in 1875 by Seth Lewelling, a horticulturalist who tended orchards in Oregon's Willamette Valley. The original Lewelling orchards were close to Milwaukie, OR (in red on the map below), which is just south of Portland, and are now covered by housing developments. (Query to Dave and Gwenie, residents of the Willamette Valley: Is Mr. Lewelling celebrated in in your part of the state? Do statues of him dot the landscape?) He named the cherry after his Chinese foreman, Ah Bing. Exactly how much credit is due to Ah Bing for the development of this cherry is unknown. Ah Bing's sad story is that after working for the Lewelling family for 35 years, he went back to China for a visit. Immigration laws prevented him from returning to the U.S. It was a shabby way to treat one of the key figures in the history of cherries.
The Rainier cherry was created by Washington State University in 1952 as a cross between two cherry cultivars, the Bing and the Van. It is named after Mount Rainier.
Here are pictures of my cherries.
- A pile of Bing cherries on the left and Rainier cherries on the right. This makes clear the difference in color.
- A close-up of a Rainier cherry sitting on my cutting board.
- A close-up of me holding a Rainier cherry to simulate its hanging on a tree.
Now for the moment of truth. How will the taste of a Rainier differ from that of a Bing? I picked up a Rainier cherry, plucked the stem, and popped it into my mouth. What a disappointment. It tasted more like a peach than a cherry. To me this is not good since cherries are my favorite, and I don't care much for peaches. This taste is not a huge shock, however, since cherries and peaches are both in the genus Prunus in the rose family. There is variation in how much yellow there is in each Rainier cherry, and it seemed to me that the peach flavor was stronger in the cherries that had more yellow.
The verdict: I don't plan on purchasing any more of these super-expensive little peach substitutes. I guess I am too heavily invested in Bing cherries to change cherry cultivars. One who dotes on peaches might give these a try, but keep in mind that true peaches will be much cheaper.
There is one other cultivar of sweet cherry, namely the Lambert, that is commercially cultivated though hard to find. If I see it, I will feel an obligation as a cherry connoisseur to try it. In 1916 it was called "the finest cherry grown in America." Virtually all of the cherries grown commercially in the U.S. today are Bing, Rainier, and Lambert cherries. Other cultivars grown a hundred years ago that have faded are Royal Annes and Black Republicans. Below are pictures of the somewhat heart-shaped Lambert cherry. the Royal Anne cherry, the Van cherry, and a comparison of various cultivars.
The flowers of these cherry cultivars are almost identical. The first picture below shows Rainier cherry flowers and the second shows Bing cherry flowers.
I won't go into all the familiar cherry foods, drinks, cosmetics, and medicines but will only mention two that I use. First, there is my bedside bag of cherry cough drops. always ready to deal with any throat irritation. Second, there is my workhorse, cherry chapstick. I always have a tube in my pocket, and during the winter I apply it every time I go outside; I usually apply it at least half a dozen times a day. I am forced to make such heavy use of it because I have very tender lips.
From the vast array of cherry art available, I will limit myself to three pieces.
- Cherry necklace.
- Cherry nails.
- Self-portrait that shows the Fruit Explorer eating a cherry. When this portrait was made, I was clean-shaven but needed a haircut.
Party Tip
Your party tip is to collect the stems as your guests eat their cherries. Once the cherries are finished, play cherry stem pick-up sticks. Because the stems are short, low in weight, and knobbed at one end and plain at the other rather than tapered at both ends, you will find that this is a truly challenging game. This is pick-up sticks for adults.
Travel Tip
Cherries crack if they are exposed to rain near harvest time, so they grow well in the Pacific Northwest with its dry summers. Therefore, the travel tip for cherry freaks is to visit Dave and Gwenie in Corvallis, OR, in late June. You will be able to gather a variety of cherry cultivars in the numerous near-by U-Pick'em places. This is a close as you can get to Paradise.
Reminiscence
I took my travel tip seriously and in late June of 1977 I visited Dave and Gwenie in Corvallis. A Bing cherry tree groaning with fruit grew in their back yard, and I spent hours a day up in the tree picking and eating cherries. Happiness is eating cherries until you are almost sick. (A Bing cherry tree produces 50-100 pounds of fruit each year.) After a few days, we did a twelve-hour drive from Corvallis to Palo Alto so Dave could attend a summer seminar. One of the great tragedies of my life was that at the California border I was forced to surrender my vast hoard of cherries from the back yard tree. A few years later, I was hit with another tragedy when Dave and Gwenie sold the house with the cherry tree and moved. What a come-down, when the main tree in your back yard is not a cherry tree but rather a giant sequoia.
Around 1982 I again visited Dave and Gwenie; I was, of course, careful to time my visit for late June. We went to a U-Pick'em place and spent an afternoon picking pie cherries. The plan was to can them, and the first step was to remove the pits. We had a store-bought de-pitting tool; you placed the cherry on a little ring to hold it still, and then pushed a plunger through the stem hole, and the plunger forced the pit out the other side of the cherry. This successfully removed the pit, but at the cost of making a unsightly hole in the cherry opposite the stem hole and losing some juice. A veteran at the U-Pick'em place had advised us instead to take a paper clip, unfold it so that one of the hooks was exposed, stick the hook in through the stem hole, put the hook around the pit, and pull the pit out through the stem hole. Highly skeptical, we tried the paper clip method, and, Cazart!, it worked beautifully. No extra hole, no lost juice. Gwenie got the canning operation running like an assembly line with the pit crew removing pits and with specialized pots going on the stove, and the kitchen looked like Satan's workshop with big piles of red everywhere and steam enveloping the sweating workers. We ended up canning fourteen big Mason jars of cherries, where one jar was enough for one pie. I took two jars home, and I then had the satisfaction of making Cherry Pie a la Gwenie using cherries canned by Gwenie.
A Final Thought
Next Arbor Day, instead of horsing around with some no-count tree like a Norway maple, instead plant a cherry tree. This will make it an Arbor Day to remember.
This Just In
Tomorrow I will leave to spend the weekend at Pepe and Maria's Lake House in New Hampshire, and Pepe sent me the picture below from Butternut Farm, the local U-Pick'em place. I had no idea that cherries could be picked in New England. What an eye-opener. Watch my smoke.
Rick
P.S. to Dave and Gwenie: A newly planted Bing cherry tree bears fruit after 5-6 years. I suggest that you knock down that giant sequoia in your back yard and replace it with a Bing cherry tree. If you do, I'll be showing up for a visit every year at the end of June, and I will drop my entreaties that you plant a monkey puzzle tree. (The monkey puzzle tree is a primordial-looking tree that grows in Corvallis; some consider it a living fossil. It was given its name because it was thought that a monkey would have a hard time figuring out how to climb its spiny branches. After cherries, the monkey puzzle tree is the next best thing about Corvallis. It's great fun to drive around town looking for monkey puzzle trees. For more than thirty years Gwenie has stubbornly refused my repeated suggestions to put one in her yard, using the excuse that she doesn't want to get bonked on the head by one of the giant fruits, which weigh more than 20 pounds and have sharp spines; she should focus not on the health risk but on its seeds being edible, similar to pine nuts. Moreover, fruits falling from the sky really shouldn't be a consideration since this tree doesn't start producing fruit until it is 30-40 years old; it takes its time getting started since it can live to be 2000 years old. I don't think that Gwenie shows sufficient respect for the national tree of Chile. Gwenie, however, is not alone in her distaste for this tree. A similarly negative attitude is shown by Gene Tierney in the 1947 movie, "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir," regarding a monkey puzzle tree planted in England by Rex Harrison. Rex and I are soulmates. Perhaps I should approach Elena, Dave and Gwenie's daughter, about putting a monkey puzzle tree in her yard.)
