This recipe was born of a surfeit of cherries. 2004 has been a particularly good year for them in southern Kazakhstan. There are a lot of cherry orchards in the foothills of the Tien Shan Mountains but usually there is a frost just after the blossoms open and the harvest is not so big. The same thing often happens with the apricots and apples, but this year the spring was very mild.
The Central Asian mountains are the ancestral home of apples, apricots, cherries, pears, walnuts and pistachios. I saw the original form of wild cherry plant on a visit to the Aksu Zhabagly Nature Reserve. It's a small bush, less than a metre in height and the blossoms are a deep pink, almost magenta colour. I haven't seen the fruit but I was told it is very small, bright red and quite sour, but makes a refreshing drink if boiled with water and sugar. The same day we saw wild pear, apricot and apple trees but not the nut trees as they mostly grow further south in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. We also saw three species of wild tulip. Apparently all the cultivated varieties come from eight genetic lines, three of which are from the wild varieties we saw that day.
Talking of wild things let's move on to wild mushrooms and that will bring us back in towards the recipe. This recipe uses an unusual combination of ingredients, and one might ask just what prompted me to try making a sauce with mushrooms and cherries. Here's the story. I was at the bazaar shopping and, as I've already said, this year has been a bumper cherry year so the lovely little fruits were going really cheap and I couldn't resist buying a couple of kilos. Later I called past my regular mushroom stall to see what was going on there. The woman who runs the stall usually has an excellent selection of whatever happens to be growing under trees or out in the pastures at the time. On this occasion she had little blackish-brown toadstools called 'apiatki' which are really good but I didn't buy them because she also had a bucket of larger pinkish-white mushrooms which I hadn't tried before. I forget the Russian name but they looked to me like the kind which used to grow in 'fairy rings' near our house when I was a kid. Anyway I bought a kilo and went home and dumped everything on the table. 'What am I going to do with this lot?' I asked myself. Here's what I did.
Ingredients
100g of cherries
200g of mushrooms
1 or 2 cloves of garlic
3 teaspoons of flour
50g of butter or margarine
About 3 cups of water
A few crushed black peppercorns
A very small piece of cinnamon stick or a pinch of cinnamon powder
Salt
Melt the butter/margarine and fry the chopped garlic and cinnamon for a minute, before adding the chopped mushrooms with some salt. Fry the mushrooms until all the water has come out of them and evaporated, then add the pepper and flour. Fry for a few minutes to cook the flour then add water and stoned and chopped cherries. Bring to the boil and simmer for eight to ten minutes.
I served this sauce poured over carrot and peanut cutlets and everyone enjoyed it.