Cherries

There are roughly four weeks in the European year when the cherries are real. Before that, the supermarkets sell something called a cherry that has arrived from Chile or Turkey via a refrigerated container, and tastes the way a cherry would taste if you described one over the telephone. After that, the trees are bare and the market stalls have moved on to apricots. But for those four weeks, somewhere between the end of May and the middle of July depending on which latitude you're standing in, the proper fruit appears: dark, taut-skinned, heavy in the hand, gone again before you've quite caught up with it.

Cherries are one of the few fruits that have not been bullied into year-round availability. They don't ripen after picking. They bruise if you look at them sideways. They are still, for the most part, picked by hand — there is no good way to mechanise the harvesting of something that detaches from the tree with a stem-tug. So we are still, with cherries, in roughly the same relationship to the calendar that our great-grandparents were: you eat them now, or you don't eat them at all.

The first cherry argument of the European summer happens, predictably, in France. It concerns the clafoutis.

A clafoutis is a thing the size and rough shape of a quiche, made of cherries set into a sweet pancake batter and baked until the edges puff and the cherries collapse into something approximately jam. It is from the Limousin, in the centre-west of France, and the rural grandmothers of that region will tell you, with a firmness that brooks no discussion, that the cherries must be left whole, with their stones in. To pit them, they will explain, is to remove the flavour. The almond-tinged bitterness from the pit migrates into the custard as it bakes, and gives the dish its actual character. A pitted clafoutis, in this view, is a sad pretender — technically a flaugnarde, which is what you call the same dish made with any other fruit.

Outside Limousin, people pit the cherries, on the grounds that biting into a hot stone is unpleasant and dentists are expensive. The French Académie has, more or less, sided with the grandmothers. The rest of us proceed quietly with the pitter.

Cross the line of about Vienna and the cherry that matters changes shape. East and south of there, the dominant cherry is the sour one — Prunus cerasus, visciola, vişne, višnja, wiśnia, meggy — and it is not really a fruit you eat raw at all. It is a fruit you turn into a drink.

In Turkey, vişne suyu arrives at the table in a glass tumbler beaded with condensation, the colour of a stained-glass window, sweet and bracingly tart at once. You drink it ice-cold with a piece of vişneli kek or after a kebab, and you cannot imagine, in that moment, why anyone bothered with any other juice.

In Poland and Ukraine the same cherry goes into vodka. Wiśniówka — pour sour cherries with their stems and a quantity of sugar into a glass jar, leave it on a sunny windowsill for several months, top up periodically with vodka, and produce by autumn a syrupy red liquor with a depth of flavour that makes the original vodka taste like a packing material. Every Polish grandmother who I have ever heard discuss the subject has her own version, and every version is the only correct one.

In Hungary, the sour cherry becomes meggyleves, which is a cold cherry soup served as a starter in summer, thickened with sour cream and slightly sweetened, and is the kind of dish that sounds wrong on paper and immediately makes sense the moment a bowl is put in front of you in a Budapest courtyard with the temperature outside at 34 degrees.

In Greece, the same cherry is preserved whole, in a thick dark syrup, as γλυκό βύσσινο — vissino spoon sweet — and served on a little dish with a glass of cold water and a tiny coffee spoon, as the welcoming sweet you are offered when you arrive at someone's house in midsummer. The cherry has not, in this case, been turned into a drink, but the cold water beside it has, in a sense, become one — the syrup melts into it as you eat and you finish by drinking pink water.

Germany and Switzerland take the other route. They put the cherry, eventually, into the cake.

The Black Forest gateau — Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte — has become so much a cliché of the 1970s dinner party that it is easy to forget it is a serious regional speciality. It is built around Kirschwasser, the clear cherry brandy distilled from the small dark cherries of the Black Forest, and it is the Kirschwasser, more than the whipped cream or the chocolate, that does the actual work. A proper Schwarzwälder is sharp at the edges, slightly alcoholic in a way that surprises you, faintly bitter from the kirsch and the dark chocolate together. Made well, it is not the slumping cream-mountain of memory. Made badly, of course, it is exactly that.

I have not yet mentioned the maraschino, but the maraschino has its own story. The original Marasca cherry comes from the Adriatic coast around Zadar in what is now Croatia, and the original Maraschino liqueur was made there for several centuries, exported to all the courts of Europe, and used as the base of the small bitter cocktail cherries that decorated nineteenth-century drinks. After the Second World War the production largely moved to Italy. After a few further decades of industrial enthusiasm, the cocktail cherry mutated into the radioactive scarlet thing that appeared on top of milkshakes in American diners, bleached and re-dyed and bearing no recognisable family resemblance to a cherry of any kind. Lately, a small movement of craft bartenders has been bringing the proper version back. It is, in its way, a reassuring story: the original survived, hidden in jars in Italian pastry shops, waiting for us to come to our senses.

Italy keeps several cherries going at once. There is amarena, the small sour cherry preserved in syrup, sold in the white-and-blue ceramic Fabbri jar that has not redesigned its packaging since 1915 and shows no intention of starting now. There is the fresh cherry, eaten in a paper cone walking down the street, which in much of southern Italy is sold by weight from wooden crates at the corner of a market. And there is the cherry on top of the gelato at Pasticceria Manzini in Modena, which is genuinely a Fabbri amarena, fished out of the jar with a spoon, and which costs the proprietor almost nothing and improves the gelato by approximately five hundred per cent.

And then there is Spain, which I have left for last because the Spanish cherry has its own small theatre. The Jerte Valley, in northern Extremadura, produces a particular variety — the cereza del Jerte — and every April, before the fruit is ripe, the trees flower all at once, all up and down the valley, in a brief frothing of white blossom that draws a quiet crowd of people up there to walk among the trees. Two months later the cherries come, and the same valley turns red, and the same people are mostly somewhere else.

It is the pit, in the end, that gives the whole cherry world its grammar. The pit is the reason for the almond flavour in the clafoutis, the reason for the slight bitterness in the kirsch, the reason for the amaretto (which is named for the bitter almond and which uses, traditionally, the kernels of apricot or cherry pits). It is the small armoured centre of the fruit, the thing the children spit at each other on the way home from market, the part you cannot eat and which gives the part you can eat its actual character. In a way, the entire cherry tradition of Europe — preserved, distilled, soaked, baked — is an attempt to extract a little more of what is inside that pit and stretch it across the long months when there are no more cherries.

But that is for later. For now, it is four weeks at most, and the bag on the table is going purple at the corners, and I think I had better eat them while there still are any.