I share r’s love for boozy cherries, but he overlooked the most important reason for making your own: to avoid the chemically enhanced abomination known as the “Maraschino cherry.”

Like many of you, I first encountered the candy-apple-red Maraschino atop an ice cream sundae. But it bears little relationship to the original, the dark sour marasca cherry of Croatia, which was traditionally preserved in liqueur (called maraschino) distilled from the same fruit. Partly due to Prohibition, and partly the product of American ingenuity, food scientists engineered our own alcohol-free version of preserved cherries. Granted, they required a bit more processing – bleaching with sulfur dioxide, hardening with calcium carbonate, coloring with red dyes, flavoring with benzaldehyde, and sweetening with sugar syrup, often of the high-fructose corn variety. Et voila! The modern-day Maraschino cherry was born.

Sounds appealing, doesn’t it?

My approach to making boozy cherries is a bit more seat-of-the-pants (lazy?) than others. Rather than cooking the cherries in a flavored syrup, I just combine all of the ingredients in a jar and let them marinate in the fridge. And I forgo the labor of sterilizing the jar, instead relying on the relatively high alcohol content of the syrup for preservation. Finally, I leave the spices in the cherries as they age, which increases the intensity of flavoring over time. Alternatively, you can taste the cherries periodically and remove the spices when you are happy with the results. This method is particularly useful when experimenting with unusual or strongly flavored ingredients, since you can fine-tune the taste as the cherries steep and remove individual components as necessary.

h.

Ingredients

• 1½ cups sour cherries, pitted (about ½ lb)
• ¼ cup sugar
• ¼ cup water
• ½ vanilla bean
• ½ star anise
• ½ stick cinnamon
• 2 cloves
• pinch nutmeg
• ¼ cup maraschino liqueur (I use Luxardo)
• ¼ cup brandy (I use Courvoisier)

Steps

• Combine all ingredients in a one-quart Mason jar
• Screw lid on tightly
• Shake until the sugar dissolves
• Store in the refrigerator
• [Optional] Taste weekly until the desired level of flavor is achieved, then remove spices

P.S. - R was right about one thing; the process is much easier if you can convince someone else to pick and pit the cherries!