Cherries
The warmth of May is known … relaxes and warms up. The flowers now all bloomed color streets, avenues and countryside and make walking pleasant to the eye and especially the sense of smell, thanks to the good smell they emit.
Many of these flowers have been transformed into fruit and others will become fruit with the advance of summer, when the warm sun of July and August will give them the right ripeness to be picked and eaten.
The mature ones are ready to be served on our tables or for sale.
This is the case of the cherries. Apulian red gold! The pride of our land! Expected all year round by adults and children, both for the versatility of their use – the cherries in fact as well as being eaten fresh, can be frozen, put under spirits, can be used to prepare delicious jams, to eat during the long winter, or to prepare delicious pies and cakes – are also expected by farmers who after picking them up and carefully selected sell them “to the highest bidder.
If it is true that one cherry pulls the other, there will certainly be a reason why this small red fruit with tender and juicy flesh is so irresistibly delicious.
Probably the reason lies in the fact that in addition to having a very pleasant taste, cherries have many therapeutic properties: they help the diuresis, regularize the intestine and hinder hypertension. They are also rich in minerals such as potassium, calcium and iron and vitamins: A and C and low in calories. So great after meals, as a snack and to cool off during the heat “almost summer”.
Apulian cherries are very famous and their import is in demand worldwide and even, according to the C.I.A. Confederazione Italiana Agricoltori Apulia is the first producer in Italy, specifically the areas of south-east Barese.
The first to mature are the Bigarreau, already mature since mid-May, then mature the Ferrovie (probably the best) with a rich pulp and really tasty, ideal to be put under spirits, thanks precisely to their consistency.
Finally, the Giorgia cherry, with a particularly red flesh and a consistency that allows it to resist manipulation effectively.
The cherries are harvested, strictly by hand, so as not to ruin them and thus encourage their sale.
Walking through the Apulian countryside in this period you can fully experience spring, the colors of the fields and trees, the smell of fruits and flowers, pick one and enjoy it on a dry wall, continue the walk and taste another, because there is no greater pleasure, when you eat a cherry, to pick it personally in the open countryside with the warmth of the sun, surrounded by greenery and under the shade of a cherry tree.
“I would like everyone to be able to listen to the singing of the coturnias at sunrise, see the roe deer on the pastures in spring, the larches reddened from autumn on the edges of the rocks, the flickering of the fish in the clear waters of the streams and the bees picking up the nectar from the cherry trees in bloom.
cit. Mario Rigoni Stern .
