11,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Prospect Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
Cherry trees herald Spring, with their beautiful blossoms.With our warmer summers, they also provide luscious fruit, and with a full tree of cherries, it can be difficult to know how to cook and preserve them.This book provides the inspiration and with the help of the authors, you can enjoy the fruit through the summer months. Mulberries are more unusual and represent a challenge.Wild cherries originated in the Caucasus Mountains, and cultivated cherries spread from Rome, to Britain, and then to the USA in the 1870s. Black mulberries came from central Asia, reaching Europe via ancient trade routes.White mulberries came from China and formed the highly-lucrative and closely-guarded silk trade. Red mulberries are native to the USA and grow into remarkably pretty trees.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Ähnliche
THE ENGLISH KITCHEN
CHERRIES & MULBERRIES
GROWING AND COOKING
JANE MCMORLAND HUNTER AND SALLY HUGHES
To: The Four Ms (Mum, Magic and Jane’s master tasters, Mat and Matilda) with all our love
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Cherry Tree Lane and Mulberry Walk will lead you to a world of wondrous fruits.
(With thanks to P. L. Travers and King James I)
Cherries and mulberries have much in common: they have both been an important part of man’s diet for thousands of years, they grow on beautiful trees, and, perhaps most importantly they are both fleeting visitors to our kitchens in summer. They also have intriguing histories related to the world of art; in the case of cherries, this is the story of the ornamental tree and the traditional Japanese cherry blossom festivals which have now spread and take place around the world; with mulberries it is the story of silk, that delicate and highly sought-after product of the humble silkworm.
Wild cherries have grown in northern Europe and North America since prehistoric times and sour cherries have been cultivated in Britain ever since the Romans arrived. Cherry fairs, held annually in summer, gave villagers an opportunity to make merry and writers from Shakespeare to D. H. Lawrence have set romantic or ribald scenes in cherry orchards. More demurely, A. E. Housman commemorated the beauty of cherry blossom in verse.
Black mulberries originated in central Asia, travelling across Europe on the ancient trade routes, dropping their luscious fruits as they went. White mulberries came from China, where they were catalysts for the highly lucrative and closely guarded silk trade. Red mulberries are native to the United States and although they are famed for neither berries nor silk, they do grow into remarkably pretty trees.
They are both delicate fruits and do not travel well. It is often hard to get a perfectly ripe mulberry from the tree to one’s mouth, let alone survive a journey by road, sea or rail. Cherries are easy to buy in season, but bought fruit is rarely at its best (having been picked slightly under-ripe to survive the rigours of transport) and you never see the interesting and unusual varieties for sale. In fact you rarely see any specific varieties for sale; they are all usually simply labelled ‘sweet cherries’. Sour cherries are even harder to find. The solution is to grow your own.
For hundreds of years most cherries grew on tall, stately trees which looked wonderful in spring, with their clouds of blossom reaching up to the sky, but were a nightmare to pick, requiring long ladders and a good head for heights. Breeding advances in the late twentieth century mean that all cherries can now be successfully grown on little trees which will fit in almost any garden, or even in a container if you have no garden at all. Mulberries grow on trees which acquire the patina of age when still quite young, their gnarled and twisty branches giving them a shape which is beautiful all year round. They were reasonably sized trees already; however, in 2017, after years of breeding, a new strain of mulberry bush became available, meaning these berries can also be successfully grown in containers.
Both fruits are rich in antioxidants which help to protect against the effects of ageing and the stresses of modern life. This, along with mineral and vitamin advantages, means that you owe it to yourself to include more cherries and mulberries in your diet. The anti-inflammatory properties of cherries have been recognised for centuries and cherry juice is considered an effective treatment for joint conditions such as arthritis and gout. Mulberries are surprisingly high in iron, with a small portion containing a quarter of your daily allowance. There you see, good for you as well as delicious.
In the kitchen, both fruits are endlessly adaptable, providing the basis for sweet and savoury dishes as well as preserves and drinks. We have included over fifty recipes here, ranging from a light refreshing cherry sangria to a winter braise of venison with cherry sauce, from smoked duck and cherry salad to a late summer pudding with mulberries, alongside a delicious array of cakes, biscuits, chocolates and strudels.
We make no apology for the fact that this is the second time we have included mulberries in a book. They made a brief appearance in our book Berries: Growing and Cooking, but there was not enough space there to do them justice. Their history, the story of silk, their beauty in the garden and their diversity in the dining room all meant that we wanted to write about them again. We hope that you agree with us.
THE STORY OF CHERRIES
A ripe cherry…so full of juice and tender of skin that it would burst at the very sight of a bushel basket.
(Edward Bunyard, The Anatomy of Dessert, 1933)
Wild cherries must have been one of the seasonal highlights for prehistoric man, with cherry stones found at Neolithic and Bronze Age (5,000-1,500 BC) sites in Turkey, Italy, Portugal and central Europe. They were quickly recognized as valuable trees as they provided food, timber and fuel. Given sufficient time and space, the trees will spread by means of suckers. In ancient Britain space was readily available and there were no intensive farmers demanding instant yields, so small copses of cherry trees slowly developed.
Wild sweet cherries growing in Asia Minor were cultivated by the Chinese 3,000 years ago and ancient records show that there were cherry orchards in Mesopotamia in the eighth century BC. Apparently the Assyrian King Sargon II cultivated them because he liked their fragrance. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, describes a community living at the foot of the Ural Mountains:
They live on the fruit of a certain tree, the name of which is Ponticum; in size it is about equal to our fig tree, and it bears a fruit like a bean, with a stone inside. When the fruit is ripe, they strain it through cloths; the juice which runs off is black and thick, and is called by the natives ‘aschy’. They lap this up with their tongues, and also mix it with milk for a drink; while they make the lees, which are solid, into cakes, and eat them instead of meat; for they have but few sheep in their country, in which there is no good pasturage. Each of them dwells under a tree, and they cover the tree in winter with a cloth of thick white felt, but take off the covering in summer time. No one harms these people, for they are looked upon as sacred – they do not even possess any warlike weapons. When their neighbours fall out, they make up the quarrel; and when one flies to them for refuge, he is safe from all hurt. They are called the Argippaeans.
Nearly all modern cherries are descended from two wild forms: the sweet cherry (Prunus avium) and the sour cherry (P. cerasus). The names themselves give clues to this fruit’s heritage. Most directly the word cherry comes from the Old French cherise and the Latin cerasus which, in turn, come from the Greek kerasos and the Accadian word karsu used by the Assyrians and Babylonians. Originally the Greek name was thought to have come from the city Kerasos in Asia Minor (now Giresun in Turkey), but it is far more likely that the city was called after the fruit, which passed through it on the way to distant markets.
The Roman general Lucullus is credited with introducing cultivated cherries to Western Europe, with Pliny the Elder stating in his Natural History that before 74 BC there were no cherry trees in Italy, presumably referring to cultivated plants. Lucullus successfully conquered the region of Pontus, but as well as being a great general he was also keen on his food and brought, among other things, cherry trees back to Italy, in all probability the very fruits described by Herodotus. According to Pliny: ‘In the span of a hundred and twenty years they have crossed the ocean and spread as far as Britain.’ Records confirm this, with cultivated cherries recorded in Britain in 46 AD, just three years after the Roman invasion. By 79 AD the Romans had planted extensive cherry orchards, especially in Kent where they could easily be transported to the city of London.
After the Romans left Britain horticulture in general declined, only really continuing in monastery gardens. Specialized cherry orchards, called cherruzerd or orto cersor, did survive since the fruits were so popular. In Piers Plowman William Langland describes people enjoying baked apples and cherries, no doubt a pleasant change for the poor whose basic diet consisted of vegetables and little else. Seasonal fruit was often given as a gift; in Edmund Spenser’s FaerieQueene Diana’s maid is wooed with:
…pleasing gifts for her purvey’d
Queen apples and red cherries from the tree.
Records at the convent at Ely show that fruit sometimes had to be imported to satisfy demand. Fruit cultivation in Europe continued with new varieties being introduced, particularly in Flanders and France. In 1364 the two gardens belonging to Charles V of France, Tournelles and St Paul, contained 1,125 cherry trees compared to a mere 115 apple trees and 100 pear trees.
In the sixteenth century, cherry growing was revived in England. Cherries were attractive as well as productive trees and were often planted in the ornamental areas of gardens, lining the avenues along which the grand ladies took their walks. Henry VIII loved cherries, as did Elizabeth I, and both attempted to free England from her dependence on imports. So keen was he to impress his monarch that when Sir Francis Carew knew that Elizabeth I intended to visit him he covered an entire cherry tree with damp canvas to retard the fruits so they would be perfect for her.
In 1533 Richard Harris, Henry VIII’s fruiterer, travelled to Europe in search of new and improved cultivars. He brought back cultivars from Flanders and France which were planted at a new orchard at Teynham in Kent. The orchard had apples, pears and other fruits as well as cherries and was a few miles west of the present National Fruit Collection at Brogdale. There are no records of the exact cultivars he brought back, but the orchard was believed to have been planted in a quincunx pattern, with four trees at the corners of a square and a single tree in the centre, which was both attractive and practical for the all-important pollination. For those who took the matter seriously, cherry growing could be a profitable enterprise. The Earl of Leicester planted a thirty-acre cherry orchard near Sittingbourne in Kent. A favourite of Elizabeth I, he may have planted the trees to curry favour with the monarch but it was a sound economic move anyway. Samuel Hartlib, an influential writer at the time who knew everyone from scientists and philosophers to farmers and fruit growers, claimed that in 1652 this orchard earned £1,000. Given that most growers claimed £10-15 per acre this seems a fanciful figure, but it does show that fruit growing was an activity worth pursuing.
John Gerard, in his Herball of 1597, recommended a number of varieties including ‘Luke Warde’s cherry’, called after the man who brought them from Italy, ‘Naples cherry’ after the city of its origin, and another tree which he described as bearing very large cherries ‘of a most pleasant taste, as witnesseth Mr. Bull, the Queenes Majesties Clockmaker, who did taste of the fruit (the tree bearing only one Cherry, which he did eate, but my selfe never tasted of it) at the impression hereof’. One hopes he had better luck in subsequent years.
William Lawson, in his A New Orchard and Garden of 1618, recommended that cherry trees should be grown on mounts alongside other ornamental fruits such as damsons and plums. For those with sufficiently large private gardens, cherries became very popular for both their ornamental and productive qualities; at her house in Wimbledon Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, employed the French designer André Mollet to create a baroque design with avenues of cherry trees leading to a central fountain. The parliamentary surveyors who catalogued the garden recorded one hundred and fifty-seven cherry trees in the fruit and ornamental gardens.
Around this time settlers took their favourite cultivars with them to North America. There they found an abundance of wild fruits as well as cultivars that had travelled east from China and central Asia. Some of these then made their way back to Britain.
One of the difficulties in tracing the history of any particular variety is that there was no universal system of classification until Carl Linnaeus established one in the eighteenth century. John Parkinson, apothecary to James I and later herbalist to Charles I, attempted to impose some order, as did John Tradescant, gardener to, among others, Charles I. It was an almost impossible task; a cherry thought to have been imported by John Tradescant in 1611 was first called ‘John Tradescant’ and later ‘Tradescant’s Heart’. It was identical to ‘Noble’ and was frequently wrongly listed as ‘Archduke’, which was in turn thought by some to be the ‘Lusitanian’, first mentioned by Pliny hundreds of years earlier.
In 1665 John Rea, a botanist and author, recommended sixteen varieties, including the ‘Duke’, later the ‘May Duke’, which was one of the intermediaries between sweet and sour cherries. The origins of these cherries are confusing; it seems likely that the name ‘May Duke’ is a corruption of Médoc suggesting that the fruits originated in France, but they were called Anglais or Anglais Hâtive (meaning ‘Early English’) by the French, indicating that perhaps they were bred in England. To further confuse matters, John Parkinson had mentioned a similar cherry called ‘May’ in 1629. In 1827 the Royal Horticultural Society published a list of the cherries it grew at Chiswick naming 246 varieties, but many of these may have been synonyms, for example the variety known as ‘Wellington’ may have originally been a ‘Napoleon’ but been given a change of name for patriotic reasons.
From the seventeenth century onwards the aim of most breeders was to cultivate smaller trees. Sweet cherries grew on trees that were too large for most private gardens and the huge trees were hard – and at times hazardous – to harvest. Many gardeners grew fruit trees in their walled gardens, either trained against the walls or along the dividing paths. Sour cherries, which grew on smaller trees, could be planted like this, but sweet cherries would simply overpower the area.
Throughout the nineteenth century new cultivars were introduced by men such as Thomas Andrew Knight (‘Knight’s Early Black’ and ‘Waterloo’), Thomas Rivers (‘Early Rivers’) and Thomas Ingram (‘Frogmore Early’). They had mastered getting the fruit to ripen earlier but failed to reduce the size of the trees. Cherry orchards flourished in Kent, particularly along the River Medway where transport to London was quick and easy. With the advent of the railways, orchards were also planted in Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire. In 1950 there were 5,200 hectares / 12,850 acres of traditional cherry orchards in Kent alone. In spring, signposts directed people along ‘Blossom Routes’. In Devon, you could take a paddle steamer along the River Tamar to view the blossom, Cornish on one side, Devonian on the other. While young, the trees were interplanted with hops and hazels, and grass was planted between them as the trees grew larger. Sheep or cattle would then graze beneath the trees, creating an idyllic landscape. Sadly this scene is now rare.
Increasingly, in the second half of the twentieth century, the large trees proved uneconomic. The drier, warmer climates of France and Italy produced more reliable harvests and this meant that imported fruit was comparatively cheap in Britain. The noble stature of English cherry trees also began to tell against them. As 15 m / 50 feet was a fairly average height for the trees it meant that harvesting required specialized equipment and manpower. Long wooden ladders were precariously balanced amongst the branches, often inadvertently damaging the tender buds that would grow into the following year’s crop. After the Second World War the specialized labour force needed for harvesting became both scarce and costly in Britain. While dwarfing rootstocks were developed for other fruits, cherries remained huge, and as a result many orchards were dug up and replaced with easier and more profitable fruits. On a tour of the cherry orchards at Brogdale (highly recommended), our guide told us that he remembered the long ladders still being used when he first started work there as a boy. Only the more experienced pickers were allowed up them. By 1994 there were a mere 550 hectares / 1,360 acres left. It may have been written in a different century and the orchard may have been lost for different reasons, but Mrs Ranevsky’s heartfelt lament in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard seems just as applicable for our old cherry orchards: ‘Oh, my orchard! – my dear, my sweet, my beautiful orchard! My life, my youth, my happiness, goodbye! Goodbye!’
Rather surprisingly, ‘Cherry-Pickers’ refers not just to men on long ladders harvesting fruits but also to the 11th Hussars. They earned this nickname in 1811 when they were surprised by the French cavalry while picking cherries in an orchard in Spain. Later, in 1840, the name was altered to the Cherry-breeches or Cherrybums on account of the tight pink trousers which the officers wore.
In 1996 a group of Kentish growers travelled to America and saw trees growing on Gisela, a dwarfing rootstock developed in Germany. The smaller trees could be protected against late frosts and birds, and were easy to harvest, which meant that cherries were again recovering commercially. Even though we have lost the sight of the towering trees with clouds of blossom reaching up to the sky and fluffy white sheep mirroring the image below, it is good to know that cherries are again gracing the countryside.
CHERRIES IN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
Cherries are strewn through our language like so many delicious, brightly-coloured punctuation marks. We cherry pick the best jobs, take two bites of the cherry, and who can resist the small child winsomely begging ‘pretty please, with a cherry on top’. The analogy ‘life is a bowl of cherries’ is employed so frequently as to have become a cliché, often applied ironically. The 1931 song Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries has been recorded by many artists including Judy Garland, Doris Day and Johnny Mathis, and Erma Bombeck’s well-known memoir If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?, whilst having nothing to do with cherries per se, has immortalized the phrase.
In Biblical times, cherries were the fruit of Paradise, symbols of both goodness and sweetness. Jesus gave St Peter cherries, telling him not to despise small things. They are often used to balance the evil of the apple, with Christ painted holding both fruits. A typical example, now in the Royal Collection, is Virgin of the Cherries (c.1540 after Joos van Cleve) where an apple in the foreground symbolizes the fall of man while the cherries clutched by the baby Jesus represent the fruits of paradise. As in the Oriental blossom festivals, cherries in the West are also used by artists in paintings to symbolize the briefness and potential goodness of life. At the end of his anthology Other Men’s Flowers, Field Marshal Lord Wavell added a small section entitled ‘Outside the Gate’. It contained a single beautiful sonnet addressed to the ‘Lady of the Cherries’ in one of these Madonna paintings. It was written in April 1943 in the midst of the Second World War and ends with the lines:
For all that loveliness, that warmth, that light.
Blessed Madonna, I go back to fight.
The Cherry Tree Carol is based on a story in the Gospel of pseudo-Matthew, part of the New Testament Apocrypha and one of the gospels which aims to fill out details of the early life of Christ. There are many variations, but in most Joseph and the heavily-pregnant Mary are walking in an orchard. She asks him to pick her a cherry whereupon he retorts, ‘Let the father of thy baby gather cherries for thee.’ From within the womb, Jesus asks the tree to bow down so his mother may reach the fruit. Joseph is, of course, suitably humbled when the tree dutifully lowers its boughs.
The cherry is also very much part of the language of seduction and just plain sex. The colour, lusciousness and transience of the ripe cherry has resulted in associations with maidenhood throughout literature. For the Elizabethans, adroit in wordplay, the association of cherry fruit with women and stones with men (stones was an early slang word for testicles) created a world of possibilities. William Shakespeare in his play within a play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream has Thisbe declaim:
O Wall, full often has thou heard my moans
For parting my fair Pyramus and me!
My cherry lips have often kissed thy stones
Thy stones with lime and hair knit up in thee.
If you take into account the fact this scene has the wall played by a man dressed up as a wall you can understand how that one had the groundlings rolling around sniggering at the double meanings.
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the linguistic association of cherries and virginity seems to have become even more explicit. From the nineteenth century onwards, deflowering was beginning to become directly linked with cherries with phrases such as break, get, pick or pop a cherry or cherry busting and cherry splitter entering common (very common we think) parlance. Cherries came to stand for young virginal girls. It is no accident that one of the tight-jersey-wearing Pink Ladies in the 1978 musical Grease is called Marty Maraschino (‘What is your name?’ ‘Marty.’ ‘Marty what?’ ‘Marty Maraschino – you know, as in cherry’). Rock singer Joan Jett took control of the phrase in an early example of girl power when she and her band The Runaways had a hit with Cherry Bomb, belting out a song about an underage temptresses sung by a sixteen year old:
Hello Daddy, hello mom
I’m your ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb
Hello world! I’m your girl
I’m your ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb
On a higher level, lips and cherries are associated throughout sixteenth century poetry. Cherry lips were a common theme in poetry and song, with Thomas Campion combining both in his poem set to music ‘There is a Garden in Her Face’, whose refrain is ‘there cherries grow, which none may buy, till “Cherry-ripe” themselves doe cry’. Robert Herrick’s poem ‘Cherry-Ripe’ is typical of the period with romantic descriptions of Julia, the lady to whom much of his love poetry was addressed:
Cherrie-Ripe, Ripe, Ripe, I cry,
Full and faire ones; come and buy:
If so be, you ask me where
They doe grow? I answer, There,
Where my Julia’s lips doe smile;
There’s the Land, or Cherry-Ile:
Whose Plantations fully show
All the yeere, where Cherries grow.
Double cherries, used in early kissing games, are also a symbol of togetherness. Banned by many supermarkets (although surely not for their suggestive looks), double cherries make perfect earrings as many a little girl playing in the garden has found. D. H. Lawrence recognized this in his poem ‘Cherry Robbers’, where he paints a revealing picture of a rural miss: ‘Against the haystack a girl stands laughing at me, Cherries hung round her ears.’
Many authors use cherry orchards as trysting places. Understandably so, as cherry trees are beautiful and if he doesn’t turn up you can console yourself with a cherry feast. In Leo Tolstoy’s novella Family Happiness this leads to a marriage proposal, whereas in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers an eight-year relationship is consummated after some seductive fruit picking. Less happily, the fleeting nature of things can be mirrored in the cherry blossoms. In Anton Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard, a Russian landowner returns to her estate when it is to be sold up to pay debts. The themes of futility and hopelessness are echoed in the sounds of the cherry orchard being cut down at the end of the play. Interestingly, Anton Chekov himself saw The Cherry Orchard as a farce or comedy, well, he was Russian…
Mary Poppins, everyone’s idea of a perfect nanny, takes charge of the children of Cherry Tree Lane and Enid Blyton’s The Children of Cherry Tree Farm tells the story of four children spending a year in the country. Cherry pies are munched on gleefully throughout children’s literature, but for an insight into the true pride of baking cherry pies we need to look further afield to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which includes a fabulous description:
Nancy and her protégée, Jolene Katz were satisfied with their morning’s work; indeed, the latter, a thin thirteen-year-old, was agog with pride. For the longest while, she stared at the blue-ribbon winner, the oven-hot cherries simmering under the crisp lattice crust, and then she was really overcome, and, hugging Nancy, asked, ‘Honest, did I really make that myself?’ Nancy laughed, returned the embrace, and assured her that she had – with a little help…Joelene cut a piece of pie. ‘Boy!’ She said, wolfing it down, ‘I’m going to make one of those every day, seven days a week’.
Try our cherry pie recipe on page 131 and see if you have the same reaction.
Cherries mostly have positive connotations, however a more sinister view seems to emerge for some, as in Magda Szabo’s The Door, where the writer watches her mysterious neighbour bottling cherries:
