It’s cherry season, which is hard to pass up in the fruit displays right now. The ubiquity and popularity of the cherry contrasts surprisingly with the few hints of what to do with it. Just for a few other kinds of fruits there should be such a few recipes. Even the British cookbook author Nigel Slater, who has written one of the most comprehensive bestselling books on garden cuisine in the last 20 years with “Tender. He is right.
In the “Gourmetbibel France”, one of the more recent volumes on French cuisine and an almost standard work, there is much talk about what fantastic varieties the great cherry nation of Europe cultivates, from the sweet and sour “Celeste” to the mild “Bellise”. to the outer harmless pink but blood-red “Napoleonic cherry.” You can also learn there that the French president has traditionally received the first harvest trays from the Céret region for 90 years. But there are only two dishes on the subject: a simple cherry pie and the famous blue lobster with cherries, raspberries and strawberries by three-star chef Anne-Sophie Pic. In between is: nothing. In the past, such a cookbook may have mentioned the famous dessert that the monumental kitchen of France, Auguste Escoffier, designed for the jubilee of Queen Victoria. But cherries lit with a kerchief on vanilla ice cream are a dessert that even a retired market consultant from Mon Chéri would not call modern today.
Cherries can save a summer salad
To retrieve the cherry, it’s worth looking away from the cookie shop. After all, one must know to some extent how well the fruit works in sweet contexts that it can be safely combined with almonds, nuts, cinnamon, coffee or vanilla, for example. And everyone who has eaten a piece of a good Black Forest Gate knows about their dream partners – chocolate and cream. Which, by the way, doesn’t mean bakers just have it with the cherry. When you work with pasta and cherries, you usually learn how annoying quickly, for example, all the soups through a cake base, but that’s really only marginally.
But let’s go to the hearty part of the summer evening. With sour and sweet cherries, the easiest way to get there is with the salad, in which they can be perfectly combined with everything umami-like thanks to their juicy fruitiness (and a little different from, for example, the slightly fragrant and slightly snobby strawberries). ). Nigel Slater, for example, likes to remind people how well cherries go with all kinds of salted (pork) meat. For a wonderful summer salad, he combines four handfuls of peeled and halved cherries with four handfuls of baby leaf, spinach and / or rocket and almost 100 g of finely chopped ham (e.g. Parma, Coppa or Tyrolean bacon). For the sauce, mix 1 teaspoon of Dijon mustard with 2 teaspoons of red vinegar, 50 ml of olive oil and 3 tablespoons of cream and season with a pinch of salt, freshly ground pepper and a little chopped parsley. Mix the cherries, lettuce and ham, pour in the vinegar and serve. If you have no appetite for ham, you can combine cherries in salads with chalk, salted goat cheese – a dream combination.
A simple compote of gloomy cherries boiled with (a little) sugar is a suitable accompaniment for hot smoked fish, for example trout or goldfish, even if a more elaborate cherry hat would be a little more elegant. This combination can then be well varied for vegan cuisine – with smoked tofu, which is simply fried in cubes in the pan.
Advanced chefs ultimately combine sharp cherries with lamb or even with game, in Eastern Europe or the Levantine cuisine acidic varieties such as morels or Montmorency are considered equivalent substitutes for apricots, for example in Turkish pilaf with pieces of lamb, cherries, onions, safr , mint, it is infinite. However, food authors such as Nigel Slater have identified beef tongue as the cherry’s eternal dream partner because of its tenderness and buttery taste, which almost tends to Black Forest cake. But of course many will now find that you don’t have to rush things right away, a nice summer salad with cherries is also a good start.
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