My AskMe timer's still ticking down and you guys are cooler anyway.

So I've read the WIkipedia article, I know my benzaldehyded, metabisulfited, Allura Reddened cherry comes from Oregon. But frankly I'm disgusted. I buy good rye and bourbon, vermouth that comes from a centuries-old recipe on the French seashore. Why the hell would I want to dump this neon red chemicalized crap in there?

AskMeCha, guide me to a preserved cherry that J.P. Morgan would have used. Or at least something my all-organic San Francisco girlfriend wouldn't turn up her nose at.

I would find it hard to believe that someone at the Ferry Plaza building didn't have some sort of organic preserved cherry -- June Taylor is there every weekend at the farmers' market with her "Best of SF" jams and preserves, for instance -- but I can't say I've ever specifically looked. Or Rainbow Grocery? They have unexpectedly good wine and cheese sections for a stinky hippie co-op.

Make your own? Excerpted from here:

The original maraschino was a liqueur made from the fermented juice of a variety of small black cherry -- the marasca -- with some crushed cherry stones thrown in for the almond flavor. Maraschino cherries were those same black cherries, pitted and bottled up in maraschino liqueur. (The previous year's liqueur, at a guess; cherry season doesn't last that long.) They were a luxury item.

Before the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act, ingenious Americans supplied the maraschino cherry market by using cheap indigenous Queen Anne cherries, soaked in less maraschino liqueur, making up the deficiencies with artificial coloring and almond oil for flavoring.

Then, during Prohibition, someone figured out how to preserve the cherries in brine rather than alcohol, and the modern maraschino cherry was born. I don't know whether it was before or during Prohibition that they started bleaching all the natural color out of the cherries to make room for that flaming artificial red.

This is why the cherries that become maraschinos have to be picked green: since cherries soften as they get ripe, only green ones are sturdy enough to survive all the chemical processing, and the used brine is so nasty that it has to be professionally disposed of.

This is the same thing that happened to fruitcake. Originally it was made with confectionery-quality nuts and candied fruits (the latter cut into fine julienne strips), and was a popular but expensive seasonal luxury. Now it's made with crude hunks of overprocessed candied fruit and substandard nuts, and not given its proper aging. Surprise: few people like it

...And I just realized that if you read the wiki link and the stuff it links to you already knew all that so I'll just quietly show myself out, no need to get up.

You can still buy the liqueur and make your own.

If you ever want to try a fruitcake that doesn't taste like an ingot of compressed industrial waste, there are Trappist bakeries that do them properly. Oregon has one here, and they're for sale in a number of Portland stores in season.

This post....makes me happy.

The Safeway near me has cherries for $1.99/pound right now. Buy some and preserve them in simple syrup, would be my advice.

I like mudpuppie's idea.

Relatedly, I've got a jar of homemade sherried cherries in my liquor cabinet -- basically just good cherries pitted and soaked in sherry. That'll step you Manhattan up a notch.

Or if you're putting them in rye or bourbon, you could just soak them in bourbon, yes? (I'm not sure how long they'd last, though; the couple times I've bought booze-soaked cherries, they were rather mushy. I don't know if that was the alcohol or the processing.)

As opposed to the recipes that call for brine, alum, food coloring, etc., I found this, which sounds like a very good thing to try:

Homemade maraschino cherries

Makes 3 cups

1½ cups water

½ cup red grape juice

1 cup sugar

1 star anise pod

Pinch of kosher salt

1 pound fresh sweet cherries

3 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

1 teaspoon almond extract

Combine the water, grape juice, sugar, star anise and salt in a non-reactive saucepan. Heat to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar.

Reduce heat and add cherries, lemon juice and almond extract. Simmer for until cherries are just tender, not more than about four minutes. If you boil too long, they become too soft to use in cocktails.

Remove from heat and allow to cool completely. Transfer cherries and syrup to a jar, cover and refrigerate overnight. Keeps refrigerated for two weeks.

— FROM RAISING THE BAR BY NICK MAUTONE)

It came from this article, only available in google's cache.

That does sound good, taz -- and I wonder what would happen if you used pomegranate juice rather than red grape.

Maraschino: The typical straw coated bottle is by now a true icon on the mass consumption scenario. Woo!

I was reading about some guy who's growing special radishes because their anthocyanins might replace Allura Red Dye #40 in the mass-market marascherry. Pomegranate juice definitely sounds better. I may have to take a run at this myself - thanks for finding that, taz!

It's not answering your question, but I like the sort of sweet/sour cherries that are preserved in liquor that you get in the Russian grocery stores. I have used them in my Manhattans. They're good on ice cream, too.

Also semi-relatedly: my mum makes excellent fruit cake.

And I ..um.. am one of those weirdos who likes to eat maraschino cherries.

I'd like to try those, s_r. Is there any chance of finding a web link so I would know what to look for?