Savoring Sour Cherries

I’ve never forgotten the taste of my first, fresh-off-the-tree sour cherry.  It was late June in the Midwest. Al and Erna Beckmeyer’s Montmorency cherry tree—more than half a century old— was laden with a bumper crop of sour cherries. 

Like the Chardonel, Norton, and Chambourcin wine grapes grown in Hartsburg, MO in their son Orion and his wife Barbara’s vineyard, Al and Erna’s Montmorency “cherry pie” sour cherries had to be harvested at the moment of peak ripeness.  When that moment arrives, the word goes out over the Hartsburg hills and bottoms to come pick cherries before eager birds impatient to feast on the tempting red fruit strip the branches clean.

That summer, I picked cherries off branches so heavy with fruit that they touched the ground and climbed ladders to reach the sun-kissed, reddest, sweetest cherries at the top of tree. Over the course of a morning, Barbara and I shared news and exchanged ideas on what to do with our harvest.  With noon approaching, I drove home with five large plastic ice cream containers filled with juicy cherries nested in the bed of my cherry red Chevy Durango pickup truck. 

After moving to Boomerang Creek in 2005, I ordered a Montmorency cherry tree from Stark Bros Nursery in Louisiana, MO for our fledgling orchard. We harvested forty cherries from that tree the following spring—an encouraging start, but not nearly what was needed for a pie. When Barbara called to say it was once again cherry-picking time at the Beckmeyer farm, I gathered containers and drove over without a moment’s hesitation. 

Pickers had stripped two small trees the day before, but the old parent tree stood waiting for anyone with time to spare.  Orion set up ladders for me, then left me to my morning’s meditation.  For the next two hours, I was alone with the birds and the bees while the morning sun warmed my freckled shoulders, and the occasional breeze cooled the sweat beading along my brow.  When I’d filled my three large containers, I stopped in to visit with Erna and shared a bowl of broccoli soup her daughter Janet had made the day before.  Then it was time to drive home and get to work.

For anyone familiar with this heartland summer tradition, picking is just the first step in the labor-intensive journey one must be willing to undertake before cherries can be canned as a jam or preserve, boiled, and reduced to a bounce, or baked and latticed into a pie. Next comes pitting—an arduous, time-consuming, one-cherry-at-a-time, hand-eye coordination-challenging, juice-all-over-the-place operation.  

A deep-dish cherry pie takes 4-5 cups of the fruit.  My base of operation was the kitchen sink where I positioned one bowl of cherries, a dish for the pits, and a large measuring cup to receive the pitted cherries.  My cherry pitter is a hand-held, scissor-like tool into which you insert a single cherry.  When the handle is closed, a spike drives the pit out of the cherry and through a small opening at the base of melon-ball sized cup where it is nested. 

Two hours later, I had a pile of cherry pits and approximately eight cups of pitted cherries—enough for two small pies or one and a half deep-dish pies.  During that repetitive process, I listened to the soundtrack of Pride and Prejudice twice and practiced ballet in place (pliés in third position while facing the sink).  

Traverse City, Michigan on the Great Lakes is home to the annual National Cherry Festival that is underway this year from July 2-9, 2022.  If you are in a pie-making mood this holiday, some quick frozen or canned sour cherries will do.  You’ll need five cups for one-crust 9-inch, deep dish pie. Mix the cherries with a cup of granulated sugar and 3-4 tablespoons of instant tapioca.  To make a crumble topping, combine 6 tablespoons unsalted butter at room temperature, ¼ cup firmly packed light brown sugar, 1 egg white lightly beaten, ½ teaspoon vanilla extract, ¾ cup all-purpose plain flour, and 1/8 teaspoon kosher salt or coarse sea salt.

Turn the cherry filling into the pie shell, mounding the cherries slightly in the middle. Crumble the topping over the cherries, and bake 10 minutes at 425 degrees F.  Then reduce the temperature to 400 degrees F. Bake about an hour.  A scoop of vanilla ice cream or a slice of cheddar cheese will make this classic sour cherry crumble pie a hit all summer long.