Eating cherries is one thing - as Yvette observes every year, wandering around the garden, plucking handfuls then spitting out the stones from pursed lips - but picking them is quite another. The cherry trees here are very tall, with all the best fruit at the top, just waiting for the hungry starlings. Out comes the extendable ladder. In come three friends: one to climb the ladder, one to hold it steady and one to shout, "They're just above you!" I pick those on the lowest branches, which I can reach by stretching. We harvest three sorts: the crimson ones, the creamy white ones and the little wild morellos. How beautiful they look heaped in baskets, enamelled and gleaming. One needs an 18th-century poet or painter of the bucolic to do them justice. In the field below, Michel sends his wife and daughter up his cherry trees and supervises from underneath, hands on hips. I take photos of the women's heads sticking out of the high foliage, like surprised blackbirds in a pie.
It's the season for picking all the soft fruit. Supper is easy: I just stand next to the raspberry bush and gobble. The blackcurrants, redcurrants and pink currants go, stalks, leaves and all, into big stone jars to steep in eau de vie. I can't be bothered any more with making jam. The business of stripping the globules of fruit off the stalks is too fiddly and time-consuming. Redcurrant jelly is all right; you can boil the fruit up just as it comes, off the bush, and strain it.
But the best, especially for lovers of drink, is the eau de vie method. You can keep putting soft fruit into the big stone jar as you pick it and eat it weeks later, in summer puddings or the like, and drink the juice as a liqueur. Madame Saint-Ange, the 1920s author of La Bonne Cuisine, suggests the following facon menagere: for every 500 grams of fine Montmorency cherries, use between 80 and 100 grams of sugar according to taste, two cloves and a stick of cinnamon. Cover the cherries and spices in glass jars with the eau de vie, keep the jars in the sun for six weeks, then add the sugar. Eat the cherries in the winter as a dessert-cum-digestif. Best of all is to make creme de groseilles or creme de cassis for serving with white wine. The redcurrants or blackcurrants steep in the eau de vie for a month, then are strained through a muslin cloth that you wring out to extract maximum juice. Strong muscles are needed for this pleasurable, sensual task of squeezing and kneading. You then add sugar, bottle the mixture, and amuse yourself writing little
labels. Last year, Yvette, hearing that I planned to use commercial
booze, presented me with some eau de vie made from her own apples. The resulting creme was excellent. Yesterday, exhausted by playing housewife, all those hours of work, I leaned back in a deckchair and poured myself a large, delicately pink Kir.
