1. Find a bush
I try to convince myself that the explanation lies in a
rural childhood, with all its harvesting and milking and hunting and fishing
and fruit pie church socials, but in my heart I know it is deeper than
that. Only a buried atavism, the
repressed memories of the chronic semi-starvation that characterized some
ancient ancestral community of the later Stone Age, can account for my
unbounded enthusiasm for Nature’s Bounty in the form of freebie food.
I
love to gather anything edible growing in the wild. My healthy habit of eating lots of salad perhaps had its
origins in my mother’s fondness for tender dandelion leaves. In the old days, when we sometimes
vacationed in Maine, I loved clamming, gathering mussels, and of course foraging
for blueberries—with or without Sal.
In
France these days you run across references to a generation of “Sixty-Eighters”—aging
hippies and one-time political radicals, most of whom now seem to be retired
civil servants—who broke a lot of plate glass and put up a lot of cool graffiti
in 1968. Pouvoir à l’imagination!
Well, in 1968 we were living with two young children in the country in
the south of France, where I was ostensibly writing a book with the help of the
resources of the Musée Calvet in Avignon.
The Revolution came, and everything stopped. There was no gas, no bus to put the gas into, and no library
for the bus to take me to anyway. It
was the grève of grèves, the Mother of All Strikes. Under these circumstances I
became an expert in gathering and preparing gastronomic snails—with raw
materials easily found around the trunks of the great plane trees that lined
the now empty roads. The process
is complex, also slightly disgusting, but I went into it on an industrial
scale, earning the local nickname of “Grandi, le Roi des Escargots”. Edible snails are a phenomenon rather
than a food, and with careful preparation (lots of butter, garlic, and
breadcrumbs), they can really taste great—sort of like butter, garlic, and breadcrumbs. A few years ago, with friends in Michigan,
I gathered ramps (alium tricoccum)
with gusto. I’d describe a ramp as
the vegetable version of a snail.
Cook up a mess with bacon and blue cheese, and it tastes like bacon and
blue cheese, delicious.
2. Find the berries on the bush
Leaving
your garden to tend itself during a crucial month of early summer growth is
hardly exemplary horticulture, and I am paying for my frolic in Paris. The price—somewhat stringy tomato
vines—is not excessive. That the
tomatoes were growing at all is testimony to what must have been quite a lot of
rainfall, and there will be some Ramapos to contest with the groundhogs. But the rain—if it indeed fell—did
something different and more marvelous.
It seems to have created, for the first time in a decade, a really
terrific crop of wild raspberries.
3. Put picked berries in a pot
Once
you get beyond the abundant road-kill, suburban New Jersey might not seem like
the hottest bet for Found Food. It
regularly gets an eight out of ten for fungi, however, and this year I would
have to rate the raspberries at least a nine. They are almost everywhere in abandoned or poorly tended
fields, including those of the Gray Farm, where I live, and on much of the
abundant undeveloped land belonging to the University. There is a non-pecuniary price to be
paid, since they thrive in conditions hospitable as well to poison ivy.
4. Heat and mash the berries
The
sexual extravagance of the raspberry is alarming. A small bush can easily produce a hundred berries, each
berry some dozens of seeds. The
berries fall to the ground, get washed away through gullies, are carried off and
ingested by birds or college professors.
It’s a wonder the raspberry has not taken over the world.
5. Stir in lots of sugar and boil like mad
During
the past week I did some fairly serious berry-picking. At first I stuck to patches an easy
walk from my house—such as twenty yards--but then, in more ambitious mode, I
got in the truck and drove a few blocks to the real jungle, where I did battle
with serious brambles. Joan made a
scrumptious yoghurt-based raspberry fool, but that only whetted the
appetite. Over the past three days
I made and bottled two sizable batches of raspberry jam. The berries are so sweet this year that
I risked using a recipe that calls for no additional pectin—simply mashed
berries and obscene amounts of sugar.
The result is a jam that is slightly runnier than most, but absolutely
sensational for the clarity of the fruity, raspberry taste. The chompiness of the seeds gives you
the illusion of serious protein--and a reminder to floss.
The season is approaching its end, but I’m hoping to be able to do one more
batch with the girls, who will be arriving home from Europe within a few days.
6. Admire some of the results
