Nebraskaland

June 2023 • Nebraskaland 41 Great Plains tribes who traveled many miles to stream valleys where they were abundant. There, "they went into camp and worked at preparing the cherries as long as they lasted … the cherries were pounded to a pulp, pits and all, on stone mortars, and after being shaped into small cakes, were laid out to dry in the sun [and stored for later use]," wrote ethnobotanist Melvin R. Gilmore in his classic 1914 book Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region. The dried cherries, along with dried and pounded bison meat and boiled fat, were also used to make pemmican, a long-lasting winter food sealed in hide bags. Recently, my friend Scott Wessel of Bloomfi eld made chokecherry patties using the method described above, going as far as grinding the cherries, pits and all, between stones, but drying the cakes in a dehydrator rather than in the sun. He said that drying removed much of the cherries' bitterness, which can cause your mouth to pucker or even worse, as the name implies, to choke when eaten fresh. He described the cakes as "a pleasant combination of sweet and tart with a hint of almond." The drying also neutralizes the prussic acid naturally found in the pits and responsible for the almond fl avor, making the patties safe to eat. Chokecherries were also a staple fruit of early settlers. One of their recipes was for marmalade, where the cherries were mixed with an equal quantity of wild plums or crabapples to soften their bitterness. They also preserved the cherries as jelly, juice and wine. The latter helped many a lonely settler pass the long winter nights in a cold sod house. Sand cherry (P. pumila) is a low shrub with willow-like leaves that forms open to dense thickets. In Nebraska, it is most abundant in the Sandhills, but also grows in sand prairie statewide except in southeastern counties. The fl owers bloom in clusters of two to four in mid-April through mid-June, and the fi ngernail-sized, dark-purple fruits ripen in July and August. In her 1993 book Wild Seasons: Gathering and Cooking Wild Plants of the Great Plains, a must read for serious foragers, author Kay Young wrote that sand cherries produce abundant crops about every third year. The cherries are a bit bitter, less so than chokecherries, and are not bad when eaten fresh, but they come to life when sweetened with sugar and cooked. According to Young, sand cherries can be a substitute in any recipe that calls for sour cherries, and her book includes recipes for sand cherry pie, juice, jubilee, jam, jelly and more. In summer 2021, for some unknown reason, the sand cherry crop was exceptionally prolifi c in areas of the eastern Sandhills. Wessel tipped me off to this phenomenon and said the cherries were bigger and sweeter than normal and that the sand cherry pie he baked was delicious. Based on my past experience with both sand cherries and Scott, I thought he might be stretching the truth. A few days later, while driving through the Sandhills, I caught a glimpse of a cherry thicket in the highway right-of-way fl ush with purple fruit. I pulled over, emptied my water jug Plump, ripe sand cherries ready for picking. Sand cherries can be substituted in any recipe that calls for sour cherries. d n b d S of hi wi ov late eth Me Gil cla bo Pl In M R d a

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