Sexy Red Cherries in Sharp Green Salads

This is a no Jell-O, no whipped cream newsletter (for now)!

If you love cherries, you should get your hands on a cherry pitter. I listen to audio books while doing this chore.

SOMETIMES MY REFRIGERATOR is like a popular, well-endowed NYC gallery. Opening the door lights up a display of pristine, jewel-colored produce as visually compelling as modern art.

Other times it’s like a small, forgotten museum on a side-street in a third-tier city, scruffy and overcrowded to the point that whatever treasures might be buried inside go unnoticed, become damaged by neglect, and are finally deaccessioned.

I’m trying to say that I found a big bag of Bing cherries in the back of my fridge.

I couldn’t exactly remember buying them, so I didn’t know if they were an impulse purchase or if I’d had a plan for them. They’d begun to wrinkle; a few had tiny spots of mold dotting them.

What a strange thing to be alive beneath cherry blossoms!— Kobayashi Issa (These cherry blossoms are from my late Aunt Mariah’s yard in Virginia.)

I know plenty of people who might deaccession cherries like this.

But the idea of squandering food is just too disturbing to so many of us, for obvious reasons. I don’t, however, want to be one of those parsimonious, ostentatiously noble thrifty types who live life as if they just got off the Mayflower and are still willing to eat moldy or clearly spoiled food. (I’ve read more than once that on the Mayflower, children were told to dunk hardtack in beer—because the water had become too contaminated to drink—until the maggots floated to the top.)

So rather than nobly poisoning myself, I’ve been focussing on curbing waste in my kitchen by being a better planner when I shop and thinking of ways to use leftovers and scraps and surplus fruits and vegetables.

Fennel, cherries, watercress, and a whisper of pecorino: Delicious and nutritious.

And if ever there was a fruit you don’t want to waste it’s cherries, isn’t it? Not just because they’re so expensive and gorgeous and juicy and sweet and sexy and nutritious and delicious—I’ve never heard anyone say cherries are boring—but also because cherries have always been such an evocative, inspiring fruit.

Think of all the songs and poetry and stories and lore and activities featuring both cherries and their blossoms throughout the ages! Their symbolic and real pleasures can be traced at least as far back as the Middle Ages, when, according to Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book, cherry fairs among the trees highlighted “the poignancy of color and glory in lives which were normally brutish.” And today their champions include Harry Styles, who has sung about other kinds of fruit but doesn’t once mention cherries in his beautiful breakup song, Cherry: