The sweetest summer treat

All summer, I've been craving cherries. One could say it all started with bon appetit's June issue, whose cover featured a slice of what could presumably be this pie. 

But, while bon appetit didn't hurt, cherry cravings have marked my summers since childhood, as if the fruit, like edible good luck rubies, are somehow mythical balls without which the season can't start. 

Or, umm, maybe I just really like cherries. Not just any cherries, mind you. These cherries:

The French call them griottes, for Iranians it's albaloo torsh.  In Farsi, albaloo means cherry and torsh means sour; one of my cousin asked my mom if albaloo, by definition, isn't also torsh, implying that a cherry is a cherry is a cherry. He just got her classic "look," which implied, ahem, that he didn't know what he was talking about. Anyone whose tasted albaloo torsh will understand exactly what my mom meant. 

Sour cherries are smaller than sweet cherries, their skin more taut, and, as the name clearly suggests, the flesh is more sour. But it's more than that. The flavor combines sweet and sour, flicking across the taste buds to create a sensation of freshness that just sings of summer. Granted, I've gone plenty of summers without sour cherries; they're just not that easy to come by back in New Jersey, and when we did they were terribly expensive. Consider them the morel mushrooms of summer's fruit bounty. 

So imagine our excitement when my mom and I came across them on our first ever visit to Berkeley Bowl. They came from Washington state, and were packed into a large container, more than my mom and I imagined we could finish in the day and a half before she left, and definitely more than I could finish on my own before they went bad. We talked it over: whatever we didn't finish could be transformed into preserves, or pie, or ice cream; nothing would be wasted. Instead of sugar plums, my mind was packed with dancing sour cherries, full of potential and promise. 

That afternoon, we sampled them. And everyday since, I "sampled" a little more, and a little more. Today, I "sampled" the last of the pack, with no jam or other sweet in sight. 

But anyone whose ever tasted sour cherries knows that eating them fresh is the sweetest summer treat.