Hungarian Cherry Sauce: Sweet, Sour, and Savory

Hello fellow foodies, today I want to present you a very simple, yet super delicious Hungarian dish. It is not very common, even in Hungary, which I find very surprising, since it has quite a versatile taste, somewhere between salty, sweet, and sour, and is therefor an ideal combination with a huge range of other dishes. What I'm talking about is none other than Meggyszósz or in English (sour) cherry sauce.

Picking the Right Kind of Cherries

Before I continue, I want to clear up the most important requirement for this dish: It needs the correct type of cherries, which are NOT the sweet kind most of us are familiar with. The variety goes by the name Prunus cerasus, which matures about a month later than the sweet cherry. In Hungary, as well as in many other European countries, it is virtually everywhere, and so it is not surprising that people turn it into jam and preserves, or eat it raw while it's fresh. Interestingly, however, I have not seen cherries made into this kind of sauce, outside of my family, that is. My mom, who got the recipe from her mother-in-law, made it every chance she got, and when my wife acquired a taste for it, she asked me to make some for her. (You can see who's the chef in our home!)

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Fresh Fruit, Preserves, or Something in Between

So you could go ahead and use fresh cherries for this sauce, but if the season, or your geography doesn't offer you any, you can also use cherry preserves. Now the preserve can either be a sugar brine that's more candy than anything edible, or if you're lucky, you'll find pitted cherries in a glass jar, filled with slightly sugary water. Both are going to work, you just need to adjust the amount of salt.

Few and Simple Ingredients

When my wife came over to visit me in Berlin, she brought a jar of cherries with her to Mexico, so I could turn it into delicious sauce when I arrived. So I did, adding the only two other ingredients needed: sour cream and a bit of salt. Since the cherries measured about 400 g (including the water they came in), I prepared the same amount of sour cream. First I put the cherries with its water into a pot, brought it to boil, threw in the cream, and set it down to simmer. Then I added the salt, gradually, bit by bit, until the saltiness matched the sweet and sour taste of the sauce. That was all, which took me maybe ten minutes. No roux is needed, eventually even the most runny sauce will develop a pudding-like consistency.

Endless Combinations

Tasting the sauce is highly delicious, to say the least, and I could easily imagine eating it like a pudding, especially when it comes cool out of the fridge. In that case it's more like a dessert. But you can eat it warm or chilled to accompany a steak (my choice), fried chicken (my mom's favorite application), or fish, etc. Eaten with mashed potatoes it brings out a whole new flavor in both. Though I've had it on top of my granola, or even as a salad dressing. Once you try it, I'm sure you'll get a number of your own ideas how it is best to eat it. For now, I will try to find some sour cherries at the Mexican markets, since this one jar got used up very quickly.

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