An Overrated Flavor

The other day we celebrated a birthday at the office. The birthday boy had indicated to his friends that he really was a huge fan of cherry pie–so that ended up being the birthday treat, rather than cake. I happily joined in the singing of “Happy Birthday,” but I passed on the pie. I typically like fruit pies, especially apple and blueberry, I’ve never cared for cherry pie, or for that matter cherry anything. I think cherry is the most overrated, and therefore overused, flavor agent in Flavortown.

Pretty much everything comes in cherry flavor. In addition to cherry pie, you’ve got cherry-themed ice cream, chocolate-covered cherries, cherry suckers, cherry popsicles, cherries jubilee, cherry soft drinks, cherry licorice, cherry jawbreakers–the list goes on and on. In fact, cherry flavor is so ubiquitous that they even use it to make cough syrup and other patent medications more palatable. Instead of a spoonful of sugar, it’s cherry flavor that helps the medicine go down.

That overabundance of cherry items hasn’t done the cherry flavor any favors. And have you noticed that the cherry flavor in products is never subtle? Instead, it’s as if they different products are trying to out-cherry each other. The cherry flavoring in often so overpowering it has become cloying and mouth-puckering–almost as bad as grape flavor. Product manufacturers, dessert creators, and confectioners would do us all a favor by dialing back on cherry concoctions, but also on the amount of cherry flavor being infused in the product.

I think the cherry should aspire to be more like the humble apple. The apple has avoided the overexposure that has made cherry flavor so commonplace and over the top. You’ll find apple in a pie or applesauce, and maybe some sour apple gum, and of course a nice, crisp apple a day helps to keep the doctor away, but you’re not going to order an apple Coke or find apple-flavored cough drops at the drug store. Apple has stayed in its lane, and has profited from that exercise of good judgment.

Cherry, Cherry

I’m at the tail end of my sinus drainage/coughing condition.  Thanks to the frequent coughing, my voice sounds as rough and gravelly and throaty as Kathleen Turner during her Hollywood heyday.

I’ve been taking a knock-off of a night-time cold medication — one that helpfully includes a plastic shot glass that looks uncomfortably like a miniature specimen cup that you’re supposed to use to drink the stuff — to help me sleep through the night.  A slug of the mixture coats the throat thoroughly and, for the most part, has minimized the times when I wake up to go into a coughing jag.

There’s just one problem — the flavor.  Like virtually every form of cough syrup devised since the dawn of human history, this “Nite Time Cough” medicine features the strongest, most pungent, ridiculously over-the-top cherry flavor and smell that you can possibly imagine in your most appalling nightmare.  You smell it and you instantly think “cough syrup.”   You drink it and you feel like essence of fortified cherry has infused every molecule of your body.

It’s not a light cherry touch.  There’s nothing subtle about it.  It’s hit-you-over-the-head cherry flavor, cherry flavor to the factor of 10, cherry flavor like the chemist who works on the mixture inadvertently knocked over the entire bottle of cherry extract into the vat when the recipe called for only a teaspoon and decided to bottle it and send it out to market rather than admit his blunder to the boss.

Why do so many cough medications go with obscene cherry flavoring?  Perhaps the nose and taste bud assaulting cherry flavor simply does a better job of masking the actual taste of dextromethorphan HBr, doxylamine succinate, and antitistamine that are the key ingredients of the cough suppressant.  Or maybe it’s a bit more basic than that.  Maybe the manufacturer has concluded that people with coughs expect the cherry flavor, and the sickly taste is a key part of the successful treatment of the cough.  Perhaps an over-the-top, throat-coating cherry flavor more effectively communicates that you’ve got a cough and you’d better take care of it.