Thursday, June 17, 2010

I love cherries

original image seems to be irretrievably lost together with all the photobucket content, but this one is good too

I bought a small box of cherries today and suddenly went into "In my days we had _real_ cherries, no this flavorless stuff" mode.

Maybe it's just a senior moment, you know. But really.

I remember the huge cherry tree in my aunt's garden and how big and tasty and juicy and soft dark cherries were. and they weren't just sweet, they had the almondy bitterness and strong scent.

So I thought - maybe they are distinct variety, or maybe even different species - well, they could be. In fact, there were two names for two similar types of fruit - "вишня" for real, late summer stuff and "черешня" for early summer fruit, brought from afar.

I went to wikipedia to see if it had and answers. Well, no. I discovered that Russia is in the list of top cherry producing nations, though - to my surprise.

Maybe somebody knows the truth about cherries? If so, do tell

Cherry-related stuff on shutterstock 

6 comments:

nameless__one said...

I always thought that "черешня" goes as "sweet cherry" here.

nameless__one said...

Nice picture by the way :)

Tamara Kulikova said...

I think you are right, and guessing maybe everything that is sold and commercially grown here as "cherry" are different varieties of sweet cherry only. All berries I picked and bought here were early-summer crunchy stuff.

The "real" one is probably sour cherry http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prunus_cerasus Never saw them here

We found some wildly-grown trees last year in Denmark. So we'll go there again this year :)

Kirill said...

According to Wikipedia,

вишня обыкновенная = Prunus cerasus L. = sour cherry = amareno

черешня = Prunus avium L. = wild cherry = sweet cherry = ciliegio

nameless__one said...

http://www.kimtuck.com/imageshacker/df02b91cd40309de337c85ae7c58a740.gif

:)

Tamara Kulikova said...

2 nameless__one - well, yeah. on one hand "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet", but on the other "in the matter of language, a gentleman leaves nothing to chance"

names are important, especially if we are talking favorite foods. especially my favorite foods :)