Another bite of the cherry

A triumph of scarlet temptation, cherries seduce both eye and palate with their lush curves and glorious juices. Even better, after years in the doldrums, British growers are back in the game with old native varieties

- Tom Parker Bowles

IF ever there were a fruit designed for pure, unashamed pleasure, it’s the cherry. Sure, the peach might have more blatant, come-hither appeal and the strawberry her own buxom allure. Yet the cherry, with its comely, concupiscent curves and fecund, luscious succulence is a sybaritic wink in edible form, pure scarlet temptation. And, although most believe that an apple was the original forbidden fruit, used by that naughty snake to lead poor Adam and Eve into temptation, would you really risk being driven from Eden for a dreary old Granny Smith? I thought not. It’s hard to resist a cherry.

‘The precious, unkeepable cherry,’ sighs Jane Grigson, ‘was the fruit of paradise, the glimpse and symbol of perfection.’ Because it wasn’t always about lascivious desire, rather (and paradoxically) purity and innocence, too. In medieval art, cherries often represented sweet, unsullied virtue and in Renaissance paintings, from Leonardo da Vinci to Titian, the fruit was associated with the Virgin Mary, blood red like Christ’s wounds on the cross. And it’s not just in Europe. The ancient Chinese saw cherries as fruits of immortality and, in Japan, the cherry-blossom (or sakura) season is not only a celebration of spring and new birth, but a contemplation on the transience of life, as short as it is sweet. Rather nearer to home, A. E. Housman, in A Shropshire Lad, decrees the cherry ‘the loveliest of trees’ and P. Morton Shand is characteristically bombastic in his praise. ‘It is a blessed tree, the cherry-tree, and no garden planted in honour of God or Voltaire should be without one.’