Cough drops are never just.. cherry flavor, they are always wild cherry flavor. The bright red cough drops taste like cherry flavored candy. They even list cherry flavor in the ingredients. But why wild cherry? Why not wild apple, or wild lemon? Why is there this connection between wild cherry and cough medicine?
The answer is found in the history of herb use. There are many foods and spices that were mixed together to help people feel better when they had a cold or a cough. Every local healer had medicine based on local plants. In the case of a cough, it was found that the bark of a tree called a Wild Cherry (often referred to as Black Cherry) was very helpful.
The cough syrup made of the bark of the tree, did not taste like the bitter Black Cherry, or even taste like the modern cultivated sweet cherries we now use. The traditional cough syrup, made of bark, was probably referred to as wild cherry tree cough syrup, and the concept of cough syrups being associated with the words “Wild Cherry”, was born. Eventually the knowledge that it was the bark not the fruit that was important, was lost to the common man.
Parents with a sick child heard from grandparents that wild cherry cough syrup was the best, and their kids in turn would grow up and remember that their mom would give them a cherry flavored cough syrup, and since mom knew best, that misinformation was passed on to our modern age.
Basically cough drops come in cherry flavor not because it makes the cough medicine better, but because at one time wild cherry bark was the popular herb for coughs.
reference “The Energetics of Western Herbs, by Peter Holmes
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