You can do a lot more with fruit than just eat it raw

This chocolate pudding with coffee-soaked black cherries calls for Bing or Nelson cherries to be soaked in a coffee and sugar mixture then tossed with ground coffee, brown sugar, and ginger. Photo by EE Berger.

Spring is here and in Los Angeles, the fruit is good. Strawberries and cherries are peaking. Apricots are trickling in. Mulberries have arrived. You can't walk a mile in this city without spotting a tree full of bright, orange loquats. It's a perfect moment to open Abra Berens' latest book, "Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking with Fruit." It's the follow-up to her books "Ruffage," all about vegetables, and "Grist: A Practical Guide to Cooking Grains, Beans, Seeds, and Legumes."

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KCRW: What are some ways to exploit the brief cherry season? In your book, you begin with raw, then savory and sweet options. What are the raw, savory options for cherries?

Abra Berens: So the raw, savory option is a brined cherry, which I really love because it was an experiment in exploring so many things. Our season is short, too, but we have a lot of volume. Because of the volume in our area, we have a ton of ways to process [cherries.] There are a lot of fruit processing factories in Michigan that will pit the cherries and individually quick-freeze them. "IQF" is the phrase for it. Then you can find them in the grocery store just about any time of the year. So that's our access to it.

When I had all of these cherries around, I was trying to figure out, what else can I do? I was thinking about olives and preserved lemons, and how these are things that benefit from the time [they spend] with salt preserving them. I tried a couple of different types of brine. This one is actually the least salty. The reason for that is because I wasn't looking to actually preserve them in this brine. It's not like sauerkraut for cabbage.

What it does is it turns the cherries into this wonderful, almost reminiscent of an olive but a different texture but a little bit salty. I just loved the flavor so much, and I've always loved cherry and olive together. That was the idea. The technique is brining cherries in a saltwater brine and the recipe is for cherries and olives. We call it "cherries and salty snacks." It's cherries, olives, lupini beans, which I discovered while writing "Grist" and really love, and some Marcona almonds.

Your sweet version of a raw cherry recipe is chocolate pudding with coffee-soaked black cherries. It sounds luscious.

It is. I'm not a huge chocolate and fruit combo person, but I do like coffee, cherry, and chocolate together. You identified the difference between a sour or tart cherry and these sweet cherries. This uses a traditional dark, black, sweet cherry. Bings or Nelsons are big in our area. You take some cold brew coffee, granulated sugar, a little bit more ground coffee, some brown sugar, a little ginger to give it a bit of bite, and some salt, then you combine all of it. The ground coffee is meant to give it a little bit of texture, same with the brown sugar. So you're really soaking the [cherries] in the coffee and sugar mixture, then tossing them in this dry, crunchy mixture of ground coffee, brown sugar and ginger.

Tell us about the cherry baked brie with seedy crackers.

My family would make baked bries at the holidays. It was a laborious process of making puff pastry, then you would roll out the puff pastry and bake cheese in it. I didn't have time to make the pastry or go to the store and buy puff pastry, so I ended up cutting the top off the brie, loading it up with fruit, and baking it.

The fruit pops and releases all of its juice, and that bakes and carmelizes, making this nice glaze. It's really quick but it looks beautiful with all of it on top. You can finish it with these crunchy, seedy crackers to scoop it all up. And there is some maple syrup and bourbon tossed with the cherries ahead of time. That adds a depth of flavor. Sometimes fruit can be perfect, and sometimes it needs a little help along the way. Sometimes, when people get tart cherries, they need a little bit to round them out so there's a bit of maple syrup and bourbon to help cut it.

Author Abra Berens enjoys a crisp summer apple. Photo by EE Berger.

This would be really good with black cherries as well, wouldn't it?

It would. I like the sourness against the richness of a brie. I say in the headnote that this recipe is not for your perfect Brie de Meaux. Go to a grocery store and find a good but average brie, Camembert-style. Because you're getting that rich fattiness, I do like that extra little bit of acidity. If you're not drinking, or if you are using the sweet cherries, you can use balsamic vinegar to replace the bourbon. I love how vinegar and fruit play together.

Your book also includes a buttermilk pork tenderloin and grilled cherry salad. I love the idea of grilling cherries. Tell me you don't just throw them on the grill.

They tend to be a little bit small for that. I tend to use a frying pan on the grill. They're still gonna get a little bit of that smoke just from being on the grill. I've also been camping or in situations where I didn't have an extra frying pan, so tin foil is good as well. You're using the grill as the heat source, but because it's grilling at the same time as the pork, you're getting a little bit of that smokiness with it.

Beyond cherries, you also feature a spatchcocked chicken on top of blueberries.

Years ago, I read the "Zuni Cafe Cookbook," like all good cooks do, and there's the famous chicken with bread. Somehow, that evolved in my home to being chicken that's roasted over bread. It's pretty classic to roast chicken over potatoes and carrots. I really like putting some cubed, stale bread in there with something like cherry tomatoes or something kind of acidic — lemon is a classic one — and then a little bit of wine and stock. As the chicken roasts, the juices drip into the bread. You've got crunchy pieces, soft pieces, and the chicken with crispy skin over the top.

As I was thinking about this and wanting to do a savory recipe for it, I'm thinking that blueberries and cornbread go really well together. And cornbread is always a little dry the next day, so I figure I'll take the ends of the cornbread with the blueberries. Then it just needed a little something else. Blueberry and lemon go so well together and I think anytime you can use the whole lemon…

These are not Meyer lemons, these are just regular grocery store lemons cut into pretty small pieces, so that the rind and the pith will cook together in that extra little bit of liquid. You get the sweetness and the crunchiness of the cornbread, the pops and tannic flavor of the blueberries, that bright pop of lemon, and a little bit of bitterness from its rinds and pith all underneath this spatchcocked chicken that has golden brown skin. It's a one-pot dish. It's perfect for entertaining, for Sunday suppers, things like that.

"Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking with Fruit" is a toolkit for using raw and cooked fruit in sweet and savory preparations. Photo courtesy of Chronicle Books.

Every chapter of your book not only features a fruit but a person who is representative of some type of agricultural issue. I found the interview that you did with Agatha Achindu especially important. Can you briefly summarize the concerns that she expressed in your conversation?

Agatha owns Yummy Spoonfuls, which is a fresh baby food company. All of my books have some conversation about some of the systemic issues around food. In "Pulp," specifically, there are issues of scale. I don't think many average fruit consumers recognize the different scales of growing or the different markets. I wanted to showcase the issue of both a mid-size farm and a mid-size business.

Agatha's company is an agricultural company. They take food and process it for children, so she's really reliant on those producers to create things. She is situated in such a way that they were a big enough company that she couldn't just go back to the farmers market the way that she did when she was starting out. She has to contract it. So much of the food that we grow in this country is pre-contracted — even the seconds are contracted. It was really a struggle because she wasn't the right size for the markets that she had access to. These interviews are really meant to highlight and lay bare the structural and systemic hurdles that these producers face.

There's an interview with a winery and winemakers. We talk a lot about wine having terroir and being very tied to the land on which it's grown, but I don't know that there's that same conversation about the people who grow that. Pete Lang is a managing partner at Mawby here in Michigan, which is a 50-year-old sparkling wine company. When it frosts early, he's in his vineyards at 3 a.m., building small fires to keep the air moving so that the frost won't settle on their grapes. I certainly know that when I'm drinking a glass of sparkling wine, I'm not really thinking about that. But I think it's important that we think about it at some point.

Similar to brined cherries, these cherries benefit from a long soak in a coffee syrup to help marry the flavors of coffee, chocolate, and red fruit. Tossing the soaked cherries in the coffee rub ups the ante and gives a good textural difference with the silky pudding. If you don't have the time or inclination to soak the cherries, simply tossing in the coffee rub adds just that extra something to an already luxurious dessert.

Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking with Fruit by Abra Berens, © 2023. Published by Chronicle Books. Photographs © EE Berger.