353 - Cherry Mash

There’s a uniquely midwestern confection from the nearby city of St. Joseph known as Cherry Mash. It’s some kind of cherry flavored goo with a chocolate coating that has chunks of peanuts imbedded in it.

Some people love them, some find them to be repellent. They’ve been around for a long time, and, supposedly, they’ve not altered the recipe from the time they were first created in 1918.

Because another local confection, Valomilk managed to hit the big time nationally Cherry Mash thought they could do the same so, as the story goes, following Valomilk’s lead, they took their confection to some major distributors to see if they could generate interest. Supposedly the distributors thought the confection was ghastly and refused to have anything to do with it, claiming the cherry flavor tasted like cough syrup. This is an anecdote I heard from my brother who was working for a local news station at the time he related the story to me years ago. Doing a little research online I’ve not found anything to corroborate this story, so take that for what it’s worth.

That’s a little harsh too. It doesn’t taste like cough syrup, but it doesn’t really taste like real cherries either. Cherry-ish is more like it.

Every year around this time we make brown bread and typically peppermint patties for friends and relatives for gifts. As I was perusing youTube earlier this evening I happened upon a recipe for making Cherry Mash. It was nearly the same as making peppermint patties but instead of mixing condensed milk and peppermint extract into powdered sugar for the inside of the confection, they were using drained and chopped maraschino cherries. I thought this might be a fun substitution for peppermint patties so decided to make these instead.

However, I find maraschino cherries to be cloyingly sweet and to me they barely count as fruit so I decided to substitute actual cherries from the tree in our backyard instead. We have lots of them in our freezer and need to find uses for them. I’ve made the filling, it’s resting in the freezer. I’ll dip them in chocolate tomorrow. I’ve sampled the filling. They won’t taste like cough syrup.