Berries

[poliphilo]

I've got nothing against blueberries. They're fine. It's just that they're a bit bland and unexciting. As this guy said on the radio the other day, they're "an easy listening fruit".

It was in a programme all about berries. Apparently the industry talks about major berries and minor berries. Major berries would be strawberries and blueberries- possibly raspberries- and minor berries would be everything else. Apparently the only British supermarket that still stocks gooseberries is Booths.

Until quite recently blueberries were exotic. I'm sure I never saw them in the shops when I was a kid. Their success is down to their hardiness; easy to grow (in the right climate), easy to store and transport. Those blueberries in your local supermarket- that have elbowed the minor berries off  the shelves-  could well have been harvested a month ago. It suited the industry to sell us blueberries, so they marketed them to us as a health-giving superfood. Complete tosh, of course. They're not bad for us, but they're no better than any other fruit. Gah, what saps we are!

I regret the gooseberry. The gooseberry is a wonderful fruit.  We had a gooseberry patch at the bottom of our garden. I remember picking them and "topping and tailing" them with a sharp knife and my mother or grandmother baking them into pies and crumbles. The taste is utterly distinctive and the acid makes your eyes water- but in a good way. I want them back. Please Mr Sainsbury, if you're listening, how about clearing the blueberries out of one just one little bin and filling it with gooseberries instead? You stock 'em, I'll buy 'em. Do we have a deal?

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Couldn't agree more! Blueberries often taste a bit too much like paper for my liking, whereas the goosegog's taste is tart and distinctive. Even its skin is oddly rebarbative, stubbled like a favourite uncle. Don't forget gooseberry upside-down pudding, by the way! That's my favourite.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Gooseberry jam is good too. Oh, and gooseberry fool.

If I had room to grow things I'd grow myself some minor berries- but I don't.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Blueberries are okay, I think. The ones I have tasted from the supermarkets, here, seem insipid. I remember the ones I picked as a child in Nova Scotia being more tasty, but then I suspect everything was more tasty back then. It's possible -- probable? -- that the ones we buy are inferior to berries plucked fresh from the bush.

What you haven't tasted are huckleberries, a small, wild, prostrate relative of the blueberry that grows here in Virginia. Intensely flavored, they are what a blueberry ought to be but isn't.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

We have whinberries. They're tiny and grow wild round here on the moors. They don't turn up in the shops- and you have to be very dedicated to go out and gather them.

[tispity.livejournal.com]

I think whinberries might be the same thing as what we in the West Country call "Whortleberries" or "wurts". I love them and they are so much nicer and more distinctive than the bland supermarket blueberries. Mind you, like you said, it takes a lot of picking to get enough wurts for a pie!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

There are also bilberries- which I think may be the same thing under yet another name.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

I was about to say that bilberries are something different, but having thought to check Wiki first, looks like bilberries and blueberries and huckleberries are all in the same family.

Strangely, I know of bilberries because of the magical research of John Dee and Edward Kelly.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Really, what did they use them for?

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Not a use, but a descriptive comparison that sent me scurrying for a dictionary. Kelly received a vision of the watchtowers of the four quadrants, through the office of an angel named, "Ave". The spirit subsequently expounded upon the vision and, at Dee's request, agreed to "Notifie this mornings Vision, by words: as all other holy Prophets have recorded theirs" -- Cracow, Wednesday, 20 Jun 1584:

A Vision.

The sign of the love of God toward his faithful. Four sumptuous and beligerant Castles, out of which sounded Trumbets thrice.

The sign of Majesty, the Cloth of passage, was cast forth.

In the East, the cloth red; after the new smitten blood.
In the South, the cloth white, Lilly-colour.
In the West a cloth, the skins of many Dragons, green: garlick-bladed.
In the North, the cloth, Hair-coloured, Bilbery juyce. ...

Historically, I suspect it to be one of the more influential things to come out of the entire affair.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Wow.

A wonderful combination of the majestic and the homely.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Exactly. The watchtowers are fundamentally elemental, so I find this combination of majestic and homely to be most appropriate. The Dee-Kelly material has several little surprises like this. I should have expected it to be less earthy in its imagery.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Love your new head, by the way, though at first glance it seemed curiously shocking.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, it kinda leaps out at you...

[aellia.livejournal.com]

I don't like blueberries at all.
Sour little balls of juice that make muffins look as if they have mould growing in them.
I remember eating the sweeter gooseberries uncooked and the way the prickly hairs felt in my mouth!
x

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

They would never be my fruit of choice.

We're currently eating our way through a couple of bags of Kentish cherries, bought from a roadside vendor the day before last.

[aellia.livejournal.com]

Kent is good for fruit :-)
I used to pick strawberries for a living in summer's gone by. When they were in blue and white,stapled together punnets that followed the whicker ones.
xx

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I remember going to strawberry farms and picking my own- and, of course, eating all I could while doing it.

[dakegra.livejournal.com]

one of our allotment neighbours is giving us two of his gooseberry bushes, and said that we could help ourselves to what was left on the others as he already had a freezer full.

I've not really had much experience of gooseberries thus far, but K's mum made a gooseberry crumble, which was divine, and a gooseberry fool, which was utterly wonderful.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Lucky you!

When I was growing up we had gooseberry bushes and currant bushes and a range of fruit trees- plum, apple and pear- wonderful!

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

I have spent a week in a country where all the fruit is grown lkocally and actually ripe ( really will 'ripen at home'. When you buy fruit here they ask you when you plan to eat it.

I dont think I am ever going to buy stupidlky expensive flavourless crap in plastic boxes withot having some sort of public fit of anarcho-rage.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm currently munching my way through £5 worth of Kentish cherries, bought from a roadside vendor the day before yesterday.

My father-in-law's plums will be ready in a month or two. I'm really looking forward to that.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

I am told that the british public can no longer be bothered to cook gooseberries and rhubarb but prefer to eat berries that can be eaten directly from the punnet without cooking and sweetening.

Are blueberries not the same as bilberries? We used to pick those from the wild when I was a kid and put them into apple pies.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's just sad.

I don't think bilberries can be the same. According to the radio programme I was listening to blueberries don't grow naturally in the UK- and mostly have to be imported from the Americas.

[oakmouse]

According to my botany books, blueberries and bilberries are more or less cousins, but taste a bit different. I've never tasted bilberries. I know bilberry leaf tea has a very blueberryish taste, though, and tastes very like blueberry leaf tea.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've picked bilberries on the moors. They're so tiny they hardly taste of anything- just a sharp explosion of tartness and juice.

[oakmouse]

Interesting! Blueberries have a very distinctive taste, but if I had to describe it I could only, after reeling off a string of adjectives, end with saying "It tastes like blueberry" --- because not much else (except maybe huckleberries) tastes like blueberries.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've never even seen a huckleberry. Do people farm them?

[oakmouse]

Not that I know of. I've always seen them described as a wild berry.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

Hah. Blueberries are wonderful for you, and it's too bad you're getting them in those little plastic containers. Picking wild blueberries can be fun - and a little scary since in some places you must compete with bears. They are not the least bit papery, and there is nothing like a handful of wild blueberries warm from the sun.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Most of the blueberries we eat over here will have been lying around for weeks- even months- before we get them.

Fruit always tastes extra special if you pick it yourself.

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

There is no comparison between wild blueberries and their larger, seedier, tasteless supermarket varieties. The wild ones are much smaller, sweeter, and taste like blueberries. Until I moved back to the city, we would go picking several times every year and each time bring home four or five quarts of the little dears -- it took almost all day for three people to pick that many. And then, oh, the pies! The muffins! Wonderful. I tried making pies with market berries, but they were flat tasting and much too seedy. It is true that the market berries look much nicer, but that is the story with all the fruits sold in supermarkets, isn't it? Much cry and no wool as they used to say.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

We used to go picking blackberries when I was a kid. There were fields nearby that were full of wild bushes. I could go blackberrying here too- if I had the energy.

I refuse to buy blackberries in the shops.

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

Home-made gooseberry tart was always really yummy....

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes.

You can't go wrong with gooseberries.

[wolfshift.livejournal.com]

Berries are wonderfully good for you. Lots of vitamins and antioxidants without nearly as much sugar as other fruits. For most of the West, less sugar can only be a good thing.

And yes, there's a world of difference between the big, fat, bland "blueberries" you can get in the supermarkets, and proper wild blueberries.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Blueberries are being sold over here as if they had something that other berries don't- with the result that gooseberries and blackcurrants and redcurrants are being squeezed out of the picture. This is what annoys me.

[oakmouse]

They do have something that other berries don't --- but then every berry does. Each of them has its own unique beneficial properties. In the end, they're all good for you, in different ways. Nothing wrong at all with giving blueberries a miss in favor of another berry you prefer!

[oakmouse]

I can only assume you're getting the worst of the commercially-grown blueberries from America, which have sat far too long in a refrigerator compartment before they reach your stores. Decent blueberries are smallish and have a wonderful, rich, complex, sweet-tart flavor. Nothing like the bland blue mush you get in a big grocery store.

We get ours from the local farmer's market for the three or four weeks each year that the picking season here lasts, and mourn the fact that when we lived in Seattle we could get them for almost three months. We used to go to the farm with a friend in early September, as the season wound down, and buy 40-lb boxes for the winter. We'd haul our box home, open it, bag the berries up in quart bags and freeze them. It made about 24 to 26 bags, depending on how many berries we set aside to eat that week. The bags filled our freezer (a little one that was part of the fridge) to the very top, but we had blueberry cobbler and blueberry sauce and blueberry muffins and blueberry pie all winter long, October through February.

I miss living in blueberry country. *sigh*

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Most of our blueberries are imported from the US and South America. There have been attempts to set up British blueberry farms, but I gather it's a tricky crop to manage in our climate.

[oakmouse]

Yep, it would be, and maybe in your soils also. Blueberries like lots of acid in the soil, and they like plenty of rain and a warm summer, but not hot (which is why our local season is so short; we get hot spells just as the harvest season comes on, which stops the plants' normal cycle of continued flowering), and a mild but not too cold winter. One of the best places to grow them is in a damp climate with lots of evergreen trees to lay down the soil acids, which is why Maine, western Washington, and western Oregon grow fabulous blueberries.

[oakmouse]

Oh, and I think there's a disease issue too with growing them in Britain, although I may be remembering wrong.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think most of the English berries are being grown under cover. The farmer they interviewed said it wasn't easy.

[oakmouse]

Oh lordy no, it wouldn't be. Blueberry bushes look like four to five foot tall, sort of leggy and open elder bushes --- you can imagine the problems, I'm sure!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

And I'd pictured them as ground cover- totally wrong.

[oakmouse]

Even the short ones are about waist high and each plant takes up about as much space as an old-fashioned bushel basket, so they need to be planted about four feet apart for maximum fruit production. Also to have a good five to six feet of head room, if under cover.