Every season is indelibly marked with a sign, an announcement of its arrival. One fruit, or a series of fruits in a family, ushers in the next season. The cherry, the smallest in its family of stone fruits, opens the floodgates to a roiling, lovely, tumultuous river of summer fruit; they are our unquestionable proof. When summer arrives we know it, not because of an exact date or the shedding of woolen layers, but because clusters of cherries announce the season¹s softening warmth and make us giddy with hope and anticipation.

This year, when the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market newsletter arrived with news that cherries would be at Saturday's market, I made plans to be there and greet them. I spotted several pastry chefs who also said they had come to the market to taste summer's first fruit.

Cherries are not an easy fruit to grow. "There are a lot of factors you're fighting against," said Patrick Ridder, farmer at Massa Ranch in Napa Valley. Because cherry blossoms bloom in spring, a tremulous time as far as weather is concerned, they are susceptible to immediate death by frost, hard rains, or a lack of bees for pollination. Every spring, the fate of all stone fruit is determined by winter's fury. No matter what the weather, cherries have a short season and it's one of the factors making them the most expensive stone fruit to grow and pick. Like most Americans, I have been eating cherries since I was a child. A maraschino cherry garnishes our first virgin drink in a bar, the Shirley Temple, as well as banana splits and hot fudge sundaes. Alice Waters reminds us, in no uncertain terms, about the origins of maraschino cherries in her book Chez Panisse Fruit:

Maraschino cherries are not a variety at all. They are light cherries, often Royal Anns, that are bleached, dyed, sugared, flavored with bitter almond, and preserved, and don't resemble fresh cherries of any stripe. (HarperCollins, 2002)

The first time I really tasted what a cherry could be was a dozen years ago when I was Bouchon's pastry chef. One morning a farmer came unannounced to the back door. When I went outside to meet him he talked to me about the cherries in the wooden crate at his feet. Then he handed me a few cherries in a little brown paper bag to taste. At the same moment, I heard a timer go off for a cake I had in the oven. Excusing myself, I headed back into the kitchen, and as I rounded the corner, I popped one cherry in my mouth.

I stopped dead in my tracks. The annoyance of the beeping timer brought me back to reality. I took the chocolate cake from the oven, opened the bag of cherries, and looked inside. Pulling one out, I examined it under the harsh fluorescent light. The cherry had shiny tight flesh, its red-purple hue glinting with dark magenta highlights. I tasted this one slowly, savoring its warm, subtle, port-like flavor.

I went outside, determined. I looked at the handsome farmer with his wide brimmed straw hat and gold rimmed eyeglasses, then at the cherries in the box on the ground, and with the conviction of a private detective at the end of a case, I said, "These cherries in the bag, they are not the same as the ones there by your feet!" A little surprised, and maybe a bit sheepish, he replied no, they were indeed quite different.

New to farming and selling, this fellow, Patrick Ridder, had employed a trick produce purveyors are infamous for; they give a sample of their best and then sell you something sub-par.

I inquired as to how I could buy more of what was in the bag. They would cost more, he stated flatly. I said that was fine, even though I knew I would have to explain away the cost to the chef, Jeff Cerciello, who worked hard to keep our kitchen produce costs down.

But I had never eaten cherries like these. Ever. And being a fruit-inspired pastry chef meant I had to have them. Even if I did not have time to pit them. Even if I could not afford them.

Cherry season poses an enigmatic proposition to pastry chefs. Although there are few people who dislike cherries, their flavor is subtle to the point of unattainable. And pitting cherries, no matter what your tool and method of choice, is a messy, time consuming project. Not to mention that once the fruit has ejected its stone, it begins to oxidize, losing flavor and color. Many cherry aficionados will tell you that to pit a cherry is to render it without soul. The most well known cherry dessert is clafouti, a rustic French countryside affair, where crepe batter is poured into a porcelain vessel and whole cherries are baked within it. The idea is that the cherry stone emits its own flavor, partly due to a tiny "bitter almond" (known as noyau) hiding inside the hard pit. Kirsch, a distilled, clear brandy, is made from cherries still holding their stones.

A gorgeous, highly scented ice cream or pot de crème can be infused with the tiny but mighty, powerful noyau. If you have a little too much time on your hands, take a hammer to each cherry pit and extract the baby almond within. Be sure to wear safety glasses and evacuate small children from the room. If I have less time to spare, I will grind about a dozen cherry noyaux in a spice grinder with sugar to sprinkle on flaky stone-fruit galettes.

To this end, when I met those perfect cherries in Napa, I decided to put them on my menu as a special, in a bowl, untouched save a quick washing to remove dust. It was a bold move, but also a humble one. I knew no preparation I could take the time to make would do them justice.

Most cookbooks will tell you to use only sour cherries for baking. Unless you hail from the Midwest, where sour cherry varietals grow best, we in Northern California will rarely find them. Every year, readers at Chowhound.com announce when sour cherries arrive at Monterey Market or a Bay Area farmers' market. It's an excited call and a furious rush, as sour cherries offer an even shorter season than sweet cherries.

Sour cherries lend themselves to baking more easily because the subtlety of a sweet cherry's flavor tends to flatten and disappear when it comes into contact with heat and sugar. In commercial cherry dessert production, almond extract is added for extra push, teaching mouths all over the world that cherry flavor is the same as almond. (Almond extract is a distillation of the apricot stone's noyau.)

While working briefly at Chez Panisse a few years ago, I noticed a heavy reliance on Kirsch in the pastry department. In other kitchens, I've noticed cherries are always cooked with port. Although these alcohols add dimension to cherry desserts, it is my belief that to enjoy true cherry-ness, one must eat them out of hand as close to the day they were picked as possible.

That said, I recently created a dessert to show off the arrival of cherry season. Because cherry flavor is elusive, I like to use barely any sugar and pair the fruit with other subtle aromas and soft flavors. I began by making an egg-less, almost savory carnaroli rice pudding, lightly steeped with vanilla bean and one California Bay Laurel leaf. Then I baked thin and delicate double vanilla shortbread until deep golden in color. Creating what I called A Napoleon With Poetic License, I garnished the plate with freshly pitted and halved cherries atop a sauce made from cooking cherries in a cherry vinegar made by Patrick Ridder.

Patrick's vinegar is the result of the first year that he put bee hives on the levee. His cherry trees produced so much fruit, the weight of its crop felled whole limbs and small trees. Faced with more cherries than he could afford to pick and sell, Patrick combined pounded fruits‹stem, stone and all‹with white vinegar. Wanting some solids left behind, he strained the mixture a few weeks later through a sieve and left his experiment in the cool barn.

A gift of his cherry vinegar later that summer became a sticky, potent reduction garnish for a rich, warm pound cake I was serving at Bouchon. Cherries are a wonderful foil for fatty, sweet, or savory dishes. Meats like pork and duck enjoy cherry garnishes, as might a nice dish of olive oil ice cream. Although cherries are juicy, their flesh is tight, making them able to stay whole even when applied to high heat such as poaching, pickling, braising, or even roasting.

Cooking cherries, as with most fruit, is insurance against oxidation. There is always acidulation, but too much lemon juice or vitamin C will override inherent flavors and aromas, especially in fruits with less punch. A little known, almost secret, cooking technique is to freeze fruit to stop oxidation. This is how Stephen Durfee, my pastry chef at The French Laundry, and I discovered how to make cherry sorbet from raw cherries. We pitted the fruit, froze them in the deep freezer and ground them in a Champion juice extractor. Luckily for us, the cherry sorbet would later be a tiny quenelle in a miniscule dessert amuse, because, like many cherry-centric desserts, this method would render any sane person homicidal if faced with the task of producing more than a few cups of frozen cherry pulp.

With their abundance, expense, and length of season, cherries bear hopeful (or ominous) news about summer's encroaching sunny days. As with Groundhog Day, the cherry, in all its delicious, confident, and elusive perfection, tells us not only about the weather to come, but leads all its brethren: apricots, peaches, plums and hundreds of stone-fruit hybrids, into the fray. The cherry is the voluptuous red curtain that parts the way for the season we've all been waiting for. Summer.

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