Sour Cherries, greengage plums and mulberries
A love letter to the sour things we took for granted, reminiscing over the beginning of summers of my childhood in Iran
Somebody dear to my heart came back from Iran a few weeks ago. She was already laden with the usual tokens, for herself and friends; saffron, barberries and pistachios.
I asked her for gojeh sabz, the very sour and bright green greengage plums. It had been years since I’d had them. I wonder how long, too long for me to remember now.
Perhaps since that time when I found a tree here in Rome. It was about now, mid-late May to early June. And it was either on my way to, or back from my lawyer. He was taking care of work “permesso di soggiorno”, my permission to stay. The tree was hidden and I think I was on the phone when I spotted a round, shiny, very green, greengage plum and gasped! I picked as many as my hands could reach and gorged on them right then and there. It must’ve been more than a decade ago. That’s way too long to not have gojeh sabz. Crisp, and very sour, ideally sprinkled with salt, a good gojeh sabz is supposed to make your mouth puckle and you’re supposed to be crazy about it, unconditionally.
I hadn’t always been. When I was little, every child my age was crazy about goje sabz, so much so the adults in the room were often responsible to snatch the bowl out of their hand before the kids ended up with a stomach ache, drunk on too many greengage plums.
I liked the sweet things. Perhaps because there weren’t too many sweet things in my life back then. Perhaps my palate was not yet properly formed, or maybe I was a little spoiled picky eater then. I loved sour cherries though, admittedly more as jam and sharbat (cordials, god they drove me insane). We used to have those with salt too. Or in pilafs. And rhubarb too. Oh beautiful, silky, crisp and very sour rhubarb. We’d eat it raw, with salt, or it’d end up in the heavenly mint and rhubarb stew with lamb. My mom would put some, together with a few greengage plums on her vine leaf dolmeh. After all, it’s also the season for vine leaves now. There were rhubarb cordials too, but never cakes, or pies or galetts or sweets in general.
There was a compote that my mom made that encapsulated the essence of this season, very late in spring, but not quite summer; greengage plums and apricots and regular plums, sour cherries and perhaps regular cherries and rhubarbs, cooked in water and sugar, and perhaps a dash of rosewater because that’s always present. Left quite brothy, kept in the fridge once cooled down. It stayed there, expecting, for me to come back from school, and fish out a couple of components by hand, or sip some of its juice right off the big container. Or the hot afternoon, when my mom would serve it in small individual bowls.
Those afternoons, warm and bright as they were, were hardly spent outdoors. We were home mostly. I don’t remember if I felt bored, I don’t think I knew any other way to spend that time. In retrospective, those afternoons were spent a little too much in isolation, but I didn’t feel any rancor back then. When I was little, we lived in a house with a yard, sometimes I went out to play on my own. There would be fresh new cucumbers, again, sprinkled with salts, slices of tiny, golab apples, apricot halves and strawberries lightly coated in sugar, on a little plate that mom brought me half play.
When I was older, school was already too demanding to permit me play time. There were never-ceasing English classes 3 times a week, sometimes drawing lessons which were a breath of fresh air during my bone-dry, crude scientific-doctorinating education, and there were occasional private piano lessons, at which I sucked big time. We kept on because, I don’t know… I guess because we thought we had to.
A relative that we called “aunt” had a house in the countryside, barely an hour out of the city. They had a pool, and an orchard, but not really much else in that house. It was a salvation. I spent way too many hot days in that pool, becoming almost unrecognizably dark for my normally milky-white complexion. Deeper into summer there would be slices of watermelons that we ate inside the pool, (which were often injected with vodka by the time we were older), but around this season, there would still be greengage plums and apricots, and of course, mulberries.
Juicy, ripe, sweet and sour and criminally red mulberries from the trees not far from that same pool. The trees were short, we would stand there in mud dried from the heat, sometimes in plastic little slippers, often not, in our colorful nineties swimming suits (I had a gorgeous cyan one which had me dreaming I was a mermaid), dripping with chlorine-smelling water, reaching to the miraculous little red fruits. They’d break at our slightest touch, the juices running all the way from our fingertips to our arms, staining our nails, our hair, our lips, our tongues, our teeth. We’d get off from under those trees looking like a bed you’ve just made love in; a little crumpled, with unidentifiable things in unlikely spots and in need of a wash. Reeking with happiness.
And there were old sheets too. For the white mulberry trees, which were bigger. They were spreaded under a tree laden with fruit, usually it was us children who held it, and then the tree was shaken. Somebody agile would climb up and shake some of the branches too. All sorts of things would fly from the branches to that sheet, giving often way to some allergy attack. Mulberries, red or white were collected in plastic buckets. The white ones were served as breakfast piled on a big, deep plate and eaten with a spoon. The red ones were more rare, so they were served as an afternoon treat, sometimes frozen and served later next to a plain white ice cream that came out of a simple carton packaging.
Now the springs of Rome are ever shorter. A confused time between an overdrawn, long autumn and a very hot, very long summer. I hosted an Iranian dinner late in May based on the recipes in my book, and I cooked the pilaf with sour cherries to celebrate the season. Only, there’s no fresh sour cherries to be had in Italy. So I ordered the dehydrated ones on Amazon. It’s a good metaphor of the way times have changed.
Once, around the same time I found those greengages on a tree in Rome, I also found a tiny sour cherry tree not far from the place I used to live. Its blossom back in February-March had been stunning. It might have had 30 cherries all together on it. Delighted, I put my shopping bags on the ground and gorged on them, right then and there. No less than 3 Italian men stopped to reprimand me “questi non si mangiano! Sono amari”. You shouldn’t eat these, they’re bitter. It’s a shame not to distinguish bitterness from sourness. It’s one of the many losses of living where the trees of your youth don’t grow. In compensation I have learned to borrow more sour cherries from other tables; kabab karaz for example, the Syrian-Anatolian meatballs with sour cherries and pomegranate molasses, and sour cherries on vine leaves dolma, another Anatolian tradition. We love, and cherish the sourness in our part of the world.
This is a good spring though, my nostalgia for goje sabz notwithstanding. The weather’s fine, life is sweet and the ache for sourness is just a part of memory. Which in any case I much prefer to nostalgia that is a skewed and perverted version of memory. The latter is tangible and crisp, like biting into a juicy, sour, greengage plum you’ve picked from a tree on a sidewalk in Rome.

Those green plums are very present in Georgian cuisine too. The soups and sauces that come out of it, and the fruit leather. I can totally understand you missing it. I feel the same way about real avocado.
Lovely piece, dear.
I wonder if those plums are not the same that Georgians adore and make their famous sauce with. It would make sense.