Tag: cherries

Cherry Spoon Sweet

Cherry spoon sweet is a wonderful way to satisfy anyone’s sweet tooth. The flavor is so intense that one or two teaspoonfuls are usually enough to let you return to a diet of celery or baby carrots without feeling cheated.

The only serious drawback to this recipe is that you really need a cherry pitter. Spoon sweet is normally made with fresh sour cherries, but sweet cherries work fine too. Fresh cherries have pits in them, and the pits are virtually impossible to remove from the fruit without a pitter. You either have to buy a pitter or ask your friends if they have one they are willing to lend.
Cherries with pitterWe are fortunate to have such a friend. Rich and his wife Audrey bought a neat pitter that fits on top of a standard Mason jar. You just set the pitter on top of a pint jar, secure it with a canning ring and start pitting your cherries. The pits fall into the jar, making the operation neat and clean.

Spoon sweets probably originated in areas surrounding the eastern Mediterranean. Today they are popular in Egypt, Turkey, Greece, the Balkans and Russia. They are a variety of preserve that may be made with many different fruits and even with some vegetables and flowers. Once they have been cooked in the thick syrup, spoon sweets can be canned and stored like jellies and jams so it is possible that they were invented by people who hated to watch fresh fruits go to waste when there were more than could be consumed when they were in season.

If you are like me, you will enjoy making and sharing this lovely dessert with friends and relatives. Give it a try. If it is too sweet for you by the spoonful, garnish a dish of ice cream with some or spread it on your toast at breakfast.

INGREDIENTS:

1 lb. cherries
2 cups granulated sugar
1 cup water
1/4 tsp. vanilla extract
1 T lemon juice

PROCEDURE:

Wash and remove the stems and pit the cherries and spread half of them in a medium-sized glass or stainless steel bowl. Sprinkle one cup of sugar over the cherries. Spread the rest of the cherries over the sugar, cover them with the second cup of sugar and gently pour a cup of cold water into the bowl. Tip the bowl to make sure that all the sugar has been moistened.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and put it into the refrigerator for about twelve hours. Take the bowl from the refrigerator and stir the cherries to make sure that the sugar has mixed with the water and cherries. Stir gently to keep from crushing any cherries. Pour the cherries and juice into a three quart saucepan. Set the pan over high heat until the mixture begins to boil.

Reduce the heat and simmer the cherries for twenty-five minutes, stirring occasionally and skimming off any foam that forms. Gently stir in the vanilla extract and simmer the cherries for another fifteen minutes.

Put a couple of saucers into the freezer after you stir in the vanilla. When the cherries have simmered the fifteen minutes, take one of the chilled saucers from the freezer and drip two or three drops of juice from a spoon on to the saucer. If the juice is the right consistency, after a few seconds it will barely run when you tip the saucer a little.

This resembles the test used to check if jelly is done. In this case, however, you are testing whether you have a thick syrup. If the drops are runny, continue simmering the cherries for another three minutes, then test again.

When the juice passes the drip test, stir in a tablespoon of lemon juice and simmer for two more minutes. Remove the pan from the stove and set the pan aside to cool.

After the cherries are at room temperature, pour them into a container with a good lid. A quart canning jar works fine.

Store your cherry sweet in a cool cabinet or pantry and serve it by teaspoonfuls in small dessert dishes or over ice cream or yogurt. It will keep several days without refrigeration.

NOTES: Be as careful as you can to keep from mashing the cherries. Part of the charm of this sweet is that the fruit retains its identity in the syrup.

The cherry pitter occasionally misses the pit, so you should be cautious when eating cherry sweet. I have found that it helps to position the cherry with the stem scar upwards towards the plunger.

Easy Cherry Crisp

When the Cherry Man stopped at our house, my sisters and I welcomed him with shouts of joy. Mom was also happy to see him. The truck had a white insulated box with hand-painted cherries decorating the doors on each side. When the driver opened a door to get a can of frozen cherries for my mother, fog rolled toward the ground.

I think that the driver used dry ice to keep the cans frozen on his way from the Door county peninsula in northeast Wisconsin to his customers in the northwestern part of the state where we lived. The Cherry Man was tied in popularity with the Watermelon Man in our family. Both brought exotic foods that we couldn’t grow at our homestead north of Hayward.

They weren’t cheap, but they were tasty. I know that watermelons were a dollar each. This may not seem like much, but a dollar in 1955 had about the same buying power as nine dollars in 2017. You can buy a really nice watermelon for five dollars today. I never learned what the cherries cost, but three or four dollars for a ten pound can represented a major investment.

Incidentally, frozen tart or “pie cherries” as my mother called them are not less expensive today than they were when I was growing up. In fact, they may be more expensive when you can find them. Local grocers do not carry them, and you can easily pay ten dollars a pound when you order them on line. Plus shipping of course.

I don’t think that my father complained about the cost of the cherries, because he liked cherry pie and cherry crisp as much as the rest of the family. He would definitely have approved of the cost of canned cherry pie filling, a product that was not available when I was growing up. I think that a cherry pie or crisp made with fresh or frozen tart cherries tastes better than one made with canned pie filling, but if you can’t afford or even find fresh or frozen cherries, canned filling does just fine.

This recipe proves it.

INGREDIENTS:

1 can cherry pie filling
3/4 cup light brown sugar
1 cup old fashioned oatmeal
1 cup + 2 T all-purpose flour
12 T salted butter (1 1/2 sticks)
PROCEDURE:

Preheat the oven to 375º.

Use a fork to blend the sugar, flour and oatmeal together in a mixing bowl. Chop the cold butter into a half inch dice and cut the butter into the oatmeal mixture with the fork or a pastry blender. When all the dry ingredients have been worked into the butter, you should have dough with crumbs the size of peas with a few larger clumps.

Put half of the dough into a nine inch pie plate and press it with your fingers to make a bottom crust. Bake the crust on a center shelf for twelve to fourteen minutes until it just starts to brown on the edges. Take the crust from the oven to cool for about fifteen minutes.

Spoon the filling evenly over the crust. Use a fork to break up the remaining oatmeal dough as you sprinkle it over the filling. Put the pie plate on a center shelf in the oven and bake the crisp for fifteen to seventeen minutes until the topping is lightly browned.

Cool on a rack and serve with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

NOTES: We think that the best way to serve crisp is slightly warm, so we put each serving into the microwave for a few seconds before adding the scoop of ice cream. Of course you could do as we did when we were kids. We crowded around the hot crisp and waved our hands to cool it until Mom relented and dished it out.

If you are using unsalted butter, stir a quarter teaspoon of salt into the dry ingredients before cutting in the butter.