It is a prolific year for black cherries. You might call them something different: rum cherries or wild cherries or even mountain black cherries, though out here they grow mostly on the sandy sides of the road and in the dunes. Their scientific name is Prunus serotina, and whatever you call them, they’re not often seen at farmers markets or on local dinner tables. I used to think there was good reason for this. The cherries grow in clusters and are small and dark, a glossy purple that’s close to black, but they’re so tiny—somewhere between the size of a pea and a large blueberry—that they make no sense to pit the way we do the big, cultivated fruits. Chewing or pulling the cherries from around the pit is slow work, and not particularly rewarding, and because of this, I’ve never really bothered harvesting, despite how common they are locally, and how incredibly abundant.
But recently, I started wondering if this is the wrong way to think about our native wild cherries. Maybe they don’t want to be pitted; maybe they’re good whole or smooshed or strained.
There must be some good way to eat them, I started thinking, because historically people have always tended to use what’s available, and for centuries, wild black cherries have been both abundant and incredibly important here ecologically.
Over the past few years, I’ve come to understand that our wild black cherries are what scientists call a keystone plant—as important to their ecosystems as the keystone in a Roman arch. Take them out, and whole communities of life fall apart. Everywhere this species grows, from southeastern Canada to Texas, up through Nebraska, and into the Great Plains—even out into a few isolated pockets in the southwest and down through Mexico and Guatemala—black cherries are second only to oaks in the amount of biodiversity they support and create. They serve as the host plant for more than 450 species of butterflies and moths, they offer nectar to pollinators and honey bees, and they’re a favorite food of more than 40 species of birds, and lots of mammals, too.
Generally, when this many beings are eating something, there’s a good chance that we humans have figured out how to eat it, too. So, I started digging around, reading everything I could. I found that cultures all over the world have come up with ways of making good use of wild cherries despite their pits—using the pits. At first, I was surprised by this, because I’ve heard that cherry pits contain a cyanide-producing compound. Didn’t really seem like a good idea to be eating them, unless you’re looking to take someone out. But it turns out, while the pits are dangerous raw, once they’re dried or cooked, you can eat them—and they’re a great source of protein and fat, prized all over the world for their strong flavor that’s almost exactly like almond extract.
In Russia, small wild cherries similar to our wild black cherries are dried whole, pits and all, and ground into an almond-flavored flour called bird cherry flour that’s used for baking and is especially good in cake. In the Great Plains of North America, Indigenous peoples for millennia have crushed whole wild black cherries, dried them into patties in the sun, and then reconstituted these patties to make a renowned wild fruit sauce called Wojape, served as a dessert or over meat and vegetables. In France and the Mediterranean, wild cherries are boiled for their juice and strained, and then the pits are saved and dried to infuse almond flavor into liquors, breads, and extracts for baking. All these cultures avoid eating the pits raw—in addition to poisoning you, they’d also break your teeth—but once they’re cooked or dried, not only do we get the antioxidants and sugars from the fruits, but also the nutrients in the pits. It’s revolutionary, a whole new take.
The more we eat any food, I’ve noticed, the more we tend to prioritize it on the landscape. And so this summer, I’m out there, picking our wild black cherries, and seeing them full of possibility.
To learn more about cooking with wild black cherries: https://foragerchef.com/category/wild-fruit/chokecherry/
