The Real Flavor Behind Maraschino Cherries

You ate them as a kid in Shirley Temple drinks or fruit cocktails, and as an adult, they popped up in cocktails like Ina Garten's favorite whiskey sour or atop your dessert. Yet few know the story of the maraschino cherry or why it tastes the way it does. Simply put, Prohibition forced what were once fancy liqueur cherries to lose their liqueur.

In Croatia, once part of Italy, uniquely sour cherries grow on the marasca tree (where they get their name) and are jarred with a cherry liqueur. The liqueur preserves the marasca cherries for distribution around the globe. In the early 1900s, these cherries were an international delicacy. Once encased in the liqueur, the cherries had a sweet, slightly almond-like flavor from the seeds left in them, along with the stems and skins. 

The maraschino cherry began with a cherry liqueur when Girolamo Luxardo founded a Croatian distillery in 1821. Using the marasca cherry, Luxardo made a cherry liqueur called Rosolio Maraschino. In the late 1800s, the liqueur and the original maraschino cherry were used to make the first Manhattan cocktail, and in 1935, Ernest Hemingway created the Hemingway Daiquiri with Rosolio Maraschino. Now known as the Luxardo cherry (a topping that can easily improve your old fashioned), the first version is dark, rich, and less sweet than the bright red sugary ones used for ice cream sundaes. 

Prohibition came along, and the liqueur needed to be removed for the jarred cherries to be sold or made in the US. So, the liqueur was replaced with some pretty unsavory artificial ingredients — chemical preservatives. These preserved the cherries, but also changed the look and taste of the fruit. To counter that, food manufacturers created a sugary syrup with almond extract to mimic the flavor of the original. They used red dye to reproduce something resembling the real thing, but fell short, leaving us with kitschy neon-colored orbs. They called this marasca liqueur cherry knock-off a maraschino cherry, which has been a hit in the United States for over a century.

Today, American consumers can choose between the Luxardo cherry or the now-iconic maraschino cherry. However, note that most U.S.-produced maraschino cherries no longer use the marasca cherry — they use the Royal Anne cherry from Washington state. Many U.S. sweet cherries, namely Royal Anne, Gold, or Rainier, come from Washington state (one of the U.S. states that produce the most cherries). California is the second largest U.S. sweet cherry producer, and Michigan produces most of the country's sour cherries. Not to burst any maraschino bubbles further, but the marasca tree is not even native to Croatia. It originated in Central Asia.