I love cherries. I eat them like sweeties, in greedy handfuls. Spitting out the stones inelegantly, and occasionally tallying them up old school – tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. Usually thief. I like to think that means a thief of hearts rather than an actual robber but who knows? Still looking. Here in Britain, the cherries generally seen are big sweet almost black fruits, although I am pleased to see a revival of the light red, more tart “English” cherry. In Hungary cherries usually mean morello cherries. These deeply red little morsels are mouth puckeringly sour unless truly ripe, and as I’ve discussed in previous posts, we Hungarians LOVE a bit of sour. Not so easily come by in Liverpool, I’m lucky to have a friend with a morello cherry tree that she kindly picks each year for me.
In Hungary we use these sour cherries as a rather delicious rétes filling – rétes is the Hungarian strudel. It has much thinner layers than strudel, and probably owes its etymology to our Turkish past, making pastry that’s so super thin before baking that you can read a newspaper through it. My aunts would make it using a damask tablecloth, stretching the dough ever thinner across the dining table before scattering over the filling and using the cloth to roll it up tight as handling the delicate pastry became impossible once it was a certain thinness. A little cinnamon, sugar and the stoned morellos and you have the makings of a superb dessert. I will do a post on rétes soon – one of my favourite fillings is sweet cabbage. Yes. Really. It works.
The other thing we do with morello cherries is to make soup. Not what you’re thinking. This is a beautifully refreshing chilled summer soup that’s both sweet and sour – so it’s on brand for Hungarian cuisine. Hungary gets hot in the summer. Not Greek hot but 30+C hot and it often seems warmer because being (now) a landlocked country, the heat seems to linger and build up into a mass humidity that only clears with a good thunderstorm. Staying at the Balaton, the thunderstorms would roll around the lake complete with lightning. My sisters and I would go swimming. Yes in the storms. The water would be so warm and the sky would be so dark, with occasional flashes of white light and the booming crash of thunder to make us shriek. We’d stay out until the rain came, our fingers and toes wrinkled and prune like, and then run home, sliding in our cheap flip-flops, with our wet hair streaming behind us. Our relatives thought we were mad, of course, but the novelty of being able to swim outdoors, trumped any concern over weather conditions. We were brought up in the NW of England where the default weather is wet, grey and cold and we had to wait for the thermometer to reach 20C before we were allowed to have a paddling pool out. A rare occurrence.
Chilled fruit soups are common in Central/ Eastern Europe. The Jewish heritage that runs through our cuisines has given us kosher dishes fit for Shabbat dinners that linger in our collective cookery memories. Fruit soups were particularly popular in the late 19th C/ Edwardian era and despite the subsequent diaspora of our neighbours during the dark war years, these soups remain popular in Hungary as a way to (mostly) start a meal with a cooling, hydrating dish that wakes the appetite. Most Hungarian meals start with soup, even in the summer heat. The long hot summer months mean our stone fruits – apricots, peaches, plums and cherries are exceptionally delicious.
Cherry soup or Meggyléves remains my favourite version, though apricot, apple and mixed fruits also appear at the table. My father also loved this soup. So much that one summer we smuggled two young morello cherry trees home in a suitcase, and planted them at home in Liverpool. Bastard wood pigeons ate them all. Every year. We always forgot to net the trees til too late. Incidentally I note that George Lang calls this Meggykeszöce but I have no clue what that translates as! We always called it meggyléves at home (pronounced medj-levesh)
Hideg Meggyléves (Cold Morello Cherry Soup)
450g stoned morello cherries added to 1 pint of water, with the zest of half a lemon, 1 cinnamon stick, a pinch of salt and 85g sugar. Stir well and bring to a gentle simmer. In a bowl, add a heaped dessert spoon of plain flour to 150g of soured cream. Stir well. (You can use an egg yolk instead stirred into the sour cream as your thickener but the risk of curdling is a bit higher). Once the cherry juices have reached simmering point, mix a couple of ladles of the juice into the sour cream and flour mix to loosen in, then tip it all in and stir madly to prevent lumps forming. I usually use a whisk. Add 1/4 pint of dry red wine (oh come on, you KNEW alcohol was making an appearance, just be grateful lard hasn’t shown up yet), and bring the soup back up to a simmer for 10 minutes. This cooks out the flour, thickens the soup and ensures the cherries are nice and tender. Take off the heat, have a little taste – add a little more sugar or a squeeze of lemon to suit, remember that this will be served cold, so the flavours need to be quite “bright”. Remove cinnamon stick and lemon peel (or they will infuse too much of their flavour into the soup). Cover to prevent a skin forming and leave to cool before transferring to the fridge. Serve cold, with a dollop of sour cream and a sprinkle of cinnamon if liked. Perfectly pink and very refreshing on a humid day.
Finom - the food of Hungary 