Farm Dinner: Loveliest of trees

A few years ago there was an early spring in March that you might remember fondly. A stretch of weeks of hauntingly warm weather, as if a spell cast by a mysterious friend had let us skip a season and jump headlong into summer. For the fruit farmers of Michigan that warmth was no robin, but rather a bitter harbinger of a 100 year disaster; a total crop failure of cherries, apples, apricots, and plums. The trees had been tricked into blossoming before the last frost had passed. Once the cold came they would fall and die and leave an unproductive orchard.

Abby from Klug Farm came into the restaurant with buckets of blossoms trimmed from a cherry tree that would surely bear no fruit at all, once the spell had been broken and the early mornings turned cold again. She was cutting these before they fell. Maybe we could do something with the flowers? They were gorgeous - maybe more beautiful in dying - but an errant brush of your hand would send them all scattering to the ground.  

We made a batch of cherry blossom vinegar that was fragrant and sweet, yet still ripe and tender, and we used it to splash on raw fish for an appetizer.  I don't recall the dish or the recipes, but I remember the buckets of blossoms and what I had learned about the dark side of a really sunny set of days.

Ever since then I ask Abby about cherry blossoms and whether we can have some to make vinegar.  She's reluctant to trim the trees because the fruit they will bear has a value that the flowers do not.  (Seedling Farm, on the other hand, saves a few trees just for the purpose and you can buy a tender branch from Peter and force the blossoms yourself.  Makes for a beautiful centerpiece.) I was able to get a few branches from Abby for a dinner we did last week for Kinfolk Magazine down in Hyde Park's Plein Air Cafe, and the leftover branches got my sous chef Sarah thinking...

What can we do with cherry wood? Since the sweet fragrant flavor is often preferred for smoking, would it work for us in other applications? We loved the vinegar we had made with the blossoms - could we do something more robust, earthy, heartier, with the bark and the wood itself?  

This morning we have a pot of cream on the stove with the trimmings of that blossoming branch wrapped in cheesecloth as though it were a sprig of thyme. We hope it will infuse flavor into this neutral palate and then, when thickened into creme fraiche, transform into something uniquely subtle, spring-like, beautiful.

Using a peeler we will scrape and shave the branches into a jar of moscatel vinegar, apply a little heat, and let it steep for a few days. And lastly, we will throw the remaining branches, doused with water, on a set of well-tended coals and gently smoke some marrow.

Come see what we make with these things at Monday night's Farm Dinner. We are cooking with the seasons, whether spring comes in April or in late May, whether it snows like it did last week, like it did one night, for Housman, too, sometime long ago:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It leaves me only fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

- Jason Hammel