First, a bit of history. The forefather of the cocktail cherry we know today was made from the Marasca cherry, a variant of the sour Morello cherry. That special breed of cherry is most common around the Adriatic Sea, in Croatia, Bosnia, and Northeastern Italy. A similar fruit, the Amarena cherry, is most common in Central-Eastern Italy. The traditional production methods involve curing these sour cherries, often whole with pits and stems, in a sugar syrup. The result is a richly flavored, essentially candied cherry, thick with a firm bite, in a dark heavy syrup. These cherries are incredibly flavorful and make for delicious cocktails. Unfortunately, they're also very expensive and hard to come by (unless you're a fancy bar, restaurant, or patisserie). The two most common brands available in the US are Fabbri (for amarena) and Luxardo (for marasca). Luxardo is also the most prominent producer of maraschino liqueur.
For you and I, home users with too much time on our hands, homemade cocktail cherries are a feasible alternative to those "maraschino" cherries sure to survive the zombie apocalypse. There are numerous methods that we can use to produce lovely cherries, depending on our preference and patience. This is my third batch of cocktail cherries and my third method for making them.
Perhaps the simplest method is the brandied cherry. A whole cherry would be quite unpleasant for the Old Fashioned tippler on his third or fourth drink. To spare yourself and your guests the expense and unpleasantness of an unnecessary trip to the dentist, please pit your cherries. A device such as this is cheap, easy, and durable. Its design, compared with many other styles, helps reduce hand fatigue. There are also more expensive automatic pitters, worth the investment if you're working with volume.
For the brandied cherry, toss pitted cherries with plain white sugar. Pour into a clean mason jar or other non-reactive vessel. Let sit, refrigerated, for several days until sugar begins to dissolve. Fill with brandy (or bourbon for a Southern twang) and let sit for several more days, until sugar has fully dissolved (gently agitating if necessary). Beware of store-bought brandied cherries, as they tend to be mushy and either chemical-rich or somewhat sketchy.
A fancier method involves Maraschino liqueur, a spirit flavored with marasca cherries. As an aside, the distinct bitter flavor found in this liqueur comes from a form of cyanide. Yum. Fill a clean jar with cherries and top off with Maraschino liqueur. After a few days, you'll have preserved cherries. This method is expensive and the texture of the cherries is not too bad, softer than the heavily sugared cherries and plutonium cherries, firmer than cooked and brandied cherries.
For a cherry more closely resembling the fancy Italian varieties, I gently cook the cherries in heavy syrup. I like using amarena or marasca cherry juice, which can be found in most European-leaning ethnic grocery stores, but any 100% pure sour cherry juice will do.
Bring to a simmer in a pot with sugar. I used about 1.5 cups for this quart of juice, however tweaking is often necessary. Reduce the liquid until it thickens significantly, making sure that the sugar doesn't caramelize. Next, turn the stove temperature as low as it will go and add pitted cherries. For a more authentic flavor, you can also add a splash of Maraschino liqueur or Amaretto. If your tastes and uses don't mind, you can also flavor with vanilla, cinnamon, or other delicious things. Depending on the temperature, it may take quite a while for the cherries to process themselves properly. Based upon your tastes, you are trying to replace some or most of the water in the cherries' cells with sugar, but without making cherry compote.
Be careful, as the syrup will thicken significantly when the cherries cool off. If it's too thick, the cherries become hard to manage. Kept refrigerated, you should be able to hold on to your cherries for a few months. If you get sick, though, that's your own business.
Once cooled, you hopefully have a delicious cherry with the skin and structure intact, a medium bite, and a pourable syrup. This syrup can also be used in place of grenadine in cocktails, if it's watered down to a reasonable viscosity. Grenadine, like Maraschino cherries, have taken on an absurd post-industrial zombie form. Originally a pomegranate-based syrup, most grenadine now contains little more than high fructose corn syrup and red dye.
The Old Fashioned is one of my favorite cocktails, especially during these lovely Chicago winters. In the bottom of a sturdy "Old Fashioned" glass (yes, this drink goes in a glass bearing its name), muddle one of our cherries, a small wedge of orange, a few dashes of Angostura or other aromatic bitters, and a teaspoon of fine sugar. Add 2 oz bourbon or rye whiskey and stir to ensure that the sugar is dissolved. Fill the glass with cracked ice and stir again. If you're into garnishes, and I am not, you can spear an orange slice around a cherry or something silly like that.
Other delicious cocktails involving cherries include the Manhattan, Tequila Sunrise, and Whiskey Sour.
Prost!
