Illustration by Catherine Chan
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I am not a recipe person. But stew, brew or skewer, I do like to cook.
And being aware of the huge food wastage that researchers say that I and my fellow citizens are guilty of, I try to be a conservationist.
So here was my dilemma. We had just returned to home and there in our backyard, just two days after we had left and glittering with fresh rain, was a plethora of ripe red cherries. Not the big juicy fleshy supermarket cherries for sure, but tasty and with a lovely homegrown sweet/tart flavour.
In previous years the trees had either been fallow or picked over. The acrobatic squirrels and birds picked our branches as bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard – and that fruit was lofty, tantalizingly out of reach by human hand. But as our first crop of the year, the branches were still lush with goodies. What was I to do?
I found a step ladder that gave me some access, and noticed some of the branches overhung our steep-pitched garage.
So there I was on the garage roof stretching skyward using a cane to reel in those fruit-heavy branches. I was raised with a thrifty finish-what’s-on-your-plate ethic. No way was I not going to meet the cherry challenge.
Then, all of a sudden, from the kitchen door, came my wife’s panicked voice: “Peter! My God! On the roof! What in heaven’s name are you doing?”
(To be clear, I am an on enough age-defying medications to warrant wheelbarrow transport when I leave my pharmacy. At least half of my nostrums have dizziness and disequilibrium as a side effect.)
“It’s food, honey! I told you I was going fruit picking.”
Now my wife can make preserves with the best of them, but she knew that store-bought cherries are not too expensive and the ones in our backyard weren’t as sweet. Small, too, and maybe 20-per-cent pit. She didn’t feel our crop was worth risking my life for, so after a few more last-ditch picks I climbed down the ladder to where she, with her iron grip, was holding it steady. It was kind of nice. That iron grip left the ladder and held me tight with relief.
But now came the hard part. My three hours of work had yielded maybe four pounds of cherries, many of which had been sampled and left by the birds and squirrels. Some of them were green, and though they were tasty, didn’t have that crowd-pleasing orchard opulence or supermarket sweetness. To pit them all would have been too much even for our thrifty efforts.
Recently, I’d read the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer in which the author celebrates the utter joy of the Anishinaabe harvesting wild strawberries and pecans. I was mindful of those passages when I took my treasured cherries to the seclusion of our lakeside summer home. There, I had both time and focus to try to make something of them. I had a stove, a bag of sugar and the right utensils in our cabin’s small kitchen.
Making a fire by friction or flint wasn’t necessary, nor did I have to worry that containers of hide or birchbark would burn or burst. The arduous preservation work of smoking, drying and freezing was replaced by sugar and an airtight jar.
Once cooked, the pits were far easier to cull, so along with the cherries in a metal pot I heaped a random amount of sugar, threw in some water and left them on low to boil. My prep work done, I went out in the kayak.
When I took my cherries off the stove, I mashed them and did in roughly an hour what removing the pits from uncooked fruit would’ve taken three or four. I didn’t google or leaf through a cookbook for any of it. And the jam was delicious! All eight ounces of it. Just enough to fill one of those small Mason jars. The ones that sell with marmalade or strawberry jam for maybe $6 or $7 at farmers’ markets.
As the time approaches when our convenience and sustenance depends on what may be a waning supply, much of my attention turns to native cultures’ resilience and knowledge. Maybe at some level I feel that that is our future. Or perhaps I feel the lack of the natural bounty on which less tech-dependent civilizations utilized with such ingenious prosperity.
So my cherries taught me an important lesson. No matter how many wild cherries or wild pecans or wild strawberries I might find, without the time, industry or knowledge to make something of them I would be lost.
My little glass jar of cherry preserves has been stored. I will dole it out carefully. We will consume it with respect and gusto.
But even after my hard-won jam is long gone, the symbol of what a dependent life I lead will stay with me.
Peter Currier lives in Peterborough, Ont.
