Cherry Crimes and Misdemeanors

Two summery recipes and a "pitiful" confession

Illustration by Daniela Bracco

Welcome to Buona Domenica, a weekly newsletter of inspired Italian home cooking and baking. Please click at the little heart at the top of this post. This small gesture brings visibility to Buona Domenica and our Italian food-loving community. Grazie!

Want to become a better food writer? Join Kathy Gunst and me for Food Writers in Piemonte this October! Details here.

This week’s newsletter features two recipes: Amaretto Cherries, for all subscribers; and Amaretto Cherry Plumcake, for paid subscribers. Be sure to check out the entire Buona Domenica archive here, and the full index of recipes—211 and counting—here. All archived recipes are accessible to paid subscribers. If you are able to, please consider upgrading your subscription to support this newsletter.

---

The scene: a half-moon balcony on the fourth floor of an apartment building near Villa Ada, Rome.

The perpetrators: two bored girls, ages 6 and 8, or maybe 7 and 9. Me, and my sister, Maria.

The victims: passersby on the tree-lined street below.

The weapon: cherry pits.

The balcony was lined with glazed turquoise-blue tiles. It was attached to the apartment inhabited by our three aunts—our mother’s sisters. A set of double doors led from the apartment’s dining room onto the balcony, where there was a collection of plants positioned in a neat semicircle on the tiled floor, cared for by Zia Gilda. On summer mornings, she would go out there and smoke a filterless Chesterfield as she watered the pots and deadheaded the geraniums.

When we were bored, Maria and I would hang out on the balcony eating cherries and watching pedestrians as they rounded the corner of Via Fogliano. Occasionally, we would toss down a cherry pit and wait to see how close we could get to pinging the passersby. Once in awhile, we would strike and the person would look up and we would duck behind the balcony wall tee-hee-heeing at our little prank.

One sultry morning, we sat on the sea of blue-green tiles eating our plateful of cherries and before long we had amassed quite a pile of pits. Whose idea was it to launch them all at the same time? Mine, probably. Whatever little demon possessed me at that moment propelled me to raise the plate over the balcony edge and tilt it, sending the pits cascading onto the head of a woman who happened to be walking by. Maria and I ducked behind the balcony wall just as our victim began to raise her head in angry surprise. We squatted in nervous glee for what seemed like an eternity but was probably not more than a handful of seconds, for when we poked our heads up over the wall and peered down, she was still there, and still pissed off.

She yelled at us in outrage, her shouts accompanied by hand gestures. She threatened to come upstairs and beat us. We dashed into the dining room, shutting the double doors behind us, our euphoria turning to anxiety. We waited in terror for the doorbell to buzz, but it never did, and at some point, we ventured back onto the balcony and saw that the woman was gone. That was, needless to say, the last time I pelted anyone with a cherry pit or any kind of projectile. Even now, the memory makes me cringe a little bit.

Did you ever commit a childhood folly that you regret?

I still love cherries, and I still eat them by the bowlful when they’re in season. Most of the time, I do nothing beyond rinsing them under cold water to refresh them. Lately, I’ve been giving them a short bath in ice water, which firms them up and makes them satisfying crunchy when you bite into them. I learned this tip from this charming cherry post by

Jolene Handy

.

I almost never cook or bake sweet cherries because they are so good as they are. I usually reserve baking for sour cherries—cake, crostata, pie, preserves. But last week at the farmers market, I bought way too many of the dark sweet ones and had to get creative. The two recipes below are what I came up with. The first is so easy it’s hardly a recipe at all: the cherries are pitted and marinated in Amaretto liqueur and sugar, then served with whipped cream. In the second recipe, some of the marinated cherries are folded into an almond cake batter for a cherry almond cake, and the rest are turned into a compote for garnishing the cake.

A final word about cherry pits: There are far more productive ways to use them than as weapons of minuscule destruction. For example, the kernels from the pits of the St. Lucie cherry (Prunus mahaleb), a sour variety, are ground and used as a spice in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern baking to impart an almond-like flavor. This recipe from Stella Parks calls for steeping cherry pits in cream in the refrigerator overnight and then whipping the fruit-infused cream. I steep the pits from sour (Montmorency) cherries when I make Ratafia, a sour cherry liqueur. That recipe, which also uses the leaves from the cherry tree, will be forthcoming, as soon as I have the time to write it up.

And speaking of cherry beverages, I’ve bookmarked this one from

Leslie Brenner

’s newsletter, Cooks Without Borders. A cherry-lime shrub sounds like a good way to combat the excessive heat many of us have been experiencing lately.

What are your favorite dishes (sweet or savory) to make with cherries?

---

RECIPE: Amaretto Cherries with Whipped Cream

This summery dessert is so simple to make it hardly counts as a recipe. Just steep pitted sweet cherries in Amaretto liqueur and sugar to bring out their juice and stone fruit flavor. I love Amaretto—not for drinking, but because it’s such a good ingredient for baking and for spiking fruit desserts like this one. If you prefer a non-alcoholic version, substitute a drop or two of pure almond extract and a small squeeze of lemon juice. For a slightly more ambitious dessert, use these marinated cherries to make Cherry Amaretto “Plumcake.”

Makes 4 to 6 servings

INGREDIENTS
1 pound (454 g) fresh cherries
4 tablespoons (60ml) Amaretto
2 tablespoons sugar
2 dashes ground cinnamon
1 or 2 strips of lemon zest

Freshly whipped cream (sweetened or not, your choice), for serving
Whole cherries, for garnish

INSTRUCTIONS
1. Pit the cherries and cut them in half. Place them in a bowl and pour the Ameretto over them. Sprinkle on the sugar and cinnamon and fold everything together. Tuck in the lemon zest, cover and refrigerate until well chilled. Stir once or twice to make sure all the cherries get a good bath in the amaretto marinade.

2. Spoon the cherries into small bowls and dollop whipped cream on top. Garnish each with a whole cherry and serve.

Click on the button below for the printable recipe, available to paid subscribers.

---

RECIPE: Cherry Amaretto “Plumcake”

Cherries get chummy with almonds in this loaf cake. This makes sense, as the two are related. Both fruits (nuts are a type of fruit, botanically speaking) are members of the family ‘Prunus’ that also includes stone fruits such as peaches and plums. First, the cherries are marinated in Amaretto liqueur, then stirred into the cake batter. More marinated cherries are turned into a syrupy compote, for serving with the cake. I’ve also added almond flour to the batter, which gives the cake a tender, slightly crumbly texture. Yogurt imparts a welcome tang that offsets the sweetness of the fruit.

Click on the button below for the full, printable recipe, accessible to paid subscribers.

---

Thanks, as always for reading, subscribing, and sharing.

Alla prossima,
Domenica