About cherries and digression
Aug. 16th, 2011 11:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kate_schaeferI've written about cherries before, but that was a few years ago.
What I like in a cherry is a dark, round, sweet flavor and a relatively firm but not hard texture. Black Republicans and Sandra Roses are too soft, though I love both names. Tietons would be too firm, except that they're the first cherry of the year, so they're almost definitionally perfect. Reginas are the last of the season, an inferior cherry that I consider passing up, but then how can I say goodbye to cherries when there are still cherries to be had? I eat a few; they are not up to the perfection of Attikas or the near-perfection of Sweethearts or Skeenas or the excellence of Lapins, so we only buy one or two pounds, three pounds at the most. It's time to move on to blueberries, anyway. Past time.
If I described the taste of a cherry as being like an apple and like a blueberry and like a blackberry and more luscious than any of them but not as luscious as a ripe peach on a hot day, which is in turn not as luscious as a ripe apricot on a hot day, the description would be true enough, but it would miss exactly what is so cherry about a cherry. Something like an apple and a blueberry and a blackberry that falls short of a peach is clearly a sweet fruit, but if you have not eaten cherries, your mouth might imagine mango or cantaloupe. Your mouth would be so wrong, but my mouth cannot tell you why or how, not without giving you a few cherries to eat yourself.
Describing a thing by saying it's like another thing is all we can do with language. A thing isn't like another thing; it's only like its own self. A thing is like another thing, since it's a thing, after all, and all things resembles other things somewhat, even if it's only in that they exist (or don't exist, for imaginary things, but let's retreat from that abyss, shall we?). I've always careered between the splitters and the lumpers, lumpily happy to know that every single citrus fruit capable of producing a seed can cross-breed with any other citrus fruit, so in theory one could think of the grapefruit and the kumquat as the same species, then sharply interrupting my lazy thought with the reminder that lack of cross-fertility isn't the only marker of separation of species. There's breeding true! And having separate territories! And being pointed at by taxonomists!
Taxonomy is the only thing that really attracts me to the splittists, taxonomy and an admiration of Tibetan religious headdresses. When it comes to plants, I'm charmed by the idea that every part of a plant is a modified stem (Petals? Modified leaves. Leaves? Modified stems. Roots? Modified underground stems. Stems? Stems.), and then my interlocutor has to leave for a hitherto-forgotten appointment.
You may notice that there are no Bings or Rainiers or Queen Annes in my catalog of cherry perfection. They are all very well in their way, but their way is not the way I like. Bings are red enough, but not dark enough, and usually not full-flavored enough for me. They store well and ship well, which means they're picked before they're ripe and then shipped off to the rest of the nation and the world. Even the Bings that stay home here in Washington state are often picked too early, so they don't develop their full flavor. When I was younger, I preferred Queen Annes and Rainiers to the dark red cherries, thinking that their yellow and red color scheme and tarter, yet kind of peachy flavor made them a more sophisticated fruit than the vulgar round sorta dirty-tasting dark red cherries. They cost a dollar a pound more, too, which has to mean they're better, right? I was wrong then; at least, not wrong, precisely, because it's a category error to speak of being wrong when it comes to tastes, but mistaken about what it is that I like better. The thing that tastes better to me can't be determined by how much it costs; it can only be determined by what I put into my mouth, the judgment of my tongue and teeth as the fruit passes down my throat and into my alimentary history.
It's a little late in the season for you to eat good cherries this year, unless you have a late variety cherry tree in your back yard. Given this year's appalling weather just about everywhere in the US outside the Pacific rim, if you're not in Washington, Oregon, or California, you probably had a very short cherry season, with all the fruit ripening and splitting at once in the heat. If you're in the midwest and your supermarket has Washington cherries, please don't bother to buy them. They won't taste anything like what I've described. Go to a farmers' market and get some local apricots or peaches or plums instead.
What I like in a cherry is a dark, round, sweet flavor and a relatively firm but not hard texture. Black Republicans and Sandra Roses are too soft, though I love both names. Tietons would be too firm, except that they're the first cherry of the year, so they're almost definitionally perfect. Reginas are the last of the season, an inferior cherry that I consider passing up, but then how can I say goodbye to cherries when there are still cherries to be had? I eat a few; they are not up to the perfection of Attikas or the near-perfection of Sweethearts or Skeenas or the excellence of Lapins, so we only buy one or two pounds, three pounds at the most. It's time to move on to blueberries, anyway. Past time.
If I described the taste of a cherry as being like an apple and like a blueberry and like a blackberry and more luscious than any of them but not as luscious as a ripe peach on a hot day, which is in turn not as luscious as a ripe apricot on a hot day, the description would be true enough, but it would miss exactly what is so cherry about a cherry. Something like an apple and a blueberry and a blackberry that falls short of a peach is clearly a sweet fruit, but if you have not eaten cherries, your mouth might imagine mango or cantaloupe. Your mouth would be so wrong, but my mouth cannot tell you why or how, not without giving you a few cherries to eat yourself.
Describing a thing by saying it's like another thing is all we can do with language. A thing isn't like another thing; it's only like its own self. A thing is like another thing, since it's a thing, after all, and all things resembles other things somewhat, even if it's only in that they exist (or don't exist, for imaginary things, but let's retreat from that abyss, shall we?). I've always careered between the splitters and the lumpers, lumpily happy to know that every single citrus fruit capable of producing a seed can cross-breed with any other citrus fruit, so in theory one could think of the grapefruit and the kumquat as the same species, then sharply interrupting my lazy thought with the reminder that lack of cross-fertility isn't the only marker of separation of species. There's breeding true! And having separate territories! And being pointed at by taxonomists!
Taxonomy is the only thing that really attracts me to the splittists, taxonomy and an admiration of Tibetan religious headdresses. When it comes to plants, I'm charmed by the idea that every part of a plant is a modified stem (Petals? Modified leaves. Leaves? Modified stems. Roots? Modified underground stems. Stems? Stems.), and then my interlocutor has to leave for a hitherto-forgotten appointment.
You may notice that there are no Bings or Rainiers or Queen Annes in my catalog of cherry perfection. They are all very well in their way, but their way is not the way I like. Bings are red enough, but not dark enough, and usually not full-flavored enough for me. They store well and ship well, which means they're picked before they're ripe and then shipped off to the rest of the nation and the world. Even the Bings that stay home here in Washington state are often picked too early, so they don't develop their full flavor. When I was younger, I preferred Queen Annes and Rainiers to the dark red cherries, thinking that their yellow and red color scheme and tarter, yet kind of peachy flavor made them a more sophisticated fruit than the vulgar round sorta dirty-tasting dark red cherries. They cost a dollar a pound more, too, which has to mean they're better, right? I was wrong then; at least, not wrong, precisely, because it's a category error to speak of being wrong when it comes to tastes, but mistaken about what it is that I like better. The thing that tastes better to me can't be determined by how much it costs; it can only be determined by what I put into my mouth, the judgment of my tongue and teeth as the fruit passes down my throat and into my alimentary history.
It's a little late in the season for you to eat good cherries this year, unless you have a late variety cherry tree in your back yard. Given this year's appalling weather just about everywhere in the US outside the Pacific rim, if you're not in Washington, Oregon, or California, you probably had a very short cherry season, with all the fruit ripening and splitting at once in the heat. If you're in the midwest and your supermarket has Washington cherries, please don't bother to buy them. They won't taste anything like what I've described. Go to a farmers' market and get some local apricots or peaches or plums instead.
