Mulberries
Jul. 16th, 2003 01:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lydyI love mulberries. The mulberry season is almost over, here, and I'm feeling sad. We have mulberry trees in the back yard, and for the past few weeks, I've been coming home through the back yard and stopping to eaten handfuls, right off the tree. Mulberries are not a great fruit. There's little wonder why they're not raised commercially. The flavor is weak, and highly variable. The fruit is prone to fall off the tree the instant it is ripe, meaning that every berry picked causes three or four to drop to the ground. The berry itself is incredibly delicate; if you filled a pint container with mulberries, the bottom third would probably be crushed from the weight of the berries on top. Nevertheless, I love them. They grow in the back yard, they grow in other people's yards, they grow in the little bit of green bordering the Walgreen's pharmacy on Hennepin (and those trees have particularly flavorful berries). No one has ever yelled at me for eating their mulberries. They're one of the pleasures of summer. I wouldn't ever steal someone's raspberries, or blackberries, but mulberries are simply a weed. A weed fruit. (I do wonder, sometimes, why a hoity-toity restaurant such as Goodfellows hasn't used mulberries, for the novelty of it. There must be some sort of wine reduction flavored with Minnesota grown, organic mulberries that would be tasty, if only because of the wine.)
Only last year, I discovered that all children are not, by nature, hunter gatherers. I was walking along with DDB during wild grape season (which is after mulberry season). I'd snagged several bunches of wild grapes as we'd walked, much to his disapproval. Grape vines grow on cyclone fences rather satisfactorily, their broad leaves providing significant cover in the late spring that lasts until early autumn. No one cares about their fruit. Like mulberries, the grapes are commercially valueless. Wild grapes are incredibly tart, and almost all seed and skin. The actual fruit is a teeny bit of juicy grape, almost all tang, which you encounter while trying to maneuver the tough, inedible bits in your mouth into a position where they're easy to spit out. I reached out and snagged another bunch of wild grapes, and popped a couple in my mouth. Then I stopped and spit them out. They weren't grapes. I don't know what they were, but they tasted horrible and bitter. I looked again, and realized that the vine on the fence was not a grape vine, the leaves were obviously not grape leaves, and the vines were bright red.. I felt very stupid. My tongue didn't become numb, and my breathing continued to be easy, so I concluded that I hadn't been extremely stupid, just garden-variety didn't-look-before-I-leaped stupid.
"Those aren't grapes!" I said, personally aggrieved.
"No," agreed David, "what made you think that they were?"
"I don't know. They were growing on a vine. They looked just like grapes. I didn't look at the leaves." David continued to look grave. "You just disapprove of me grabbing fruit from other people's fences. Oh, come on. Every kid is a hunter gatherer at heart. Didn't you eat clover and wild berries when you were a kid?"
"Of course not!"
"'Of course not?' Why not?"
"You don't put strange things in your mouth. They might be poison."
They might be poison? What a bizarre response. It's true that mere moments ago, I had considered the possibility that I might have poisoned myself, but I never worry about it when browsing wild plants. I've casually eaten various odd bits of growing things most of my life. It's a kid thing, a secret lore that we passed on to each other. Foraging offers a feeling of freedom and independence; see, not everything I eat is given to me by my mom. The idea of running away to the forest and living on roots and berries was romantic, and some days almost painfully attractive.
Our lore was not just kid stuff, of course. I think it was my father who first showed me wild strawberries. When we lived in Upstate New York (no, no, really Upstate, think Canada) in a very small town, the library was just across the road. Street, technically, Main Street. There was a slight rise, about four steps worth, to the Library lawn. On that rise various tangles of plants grew, including strawberries. The strawberries were tiny, half the size of a raspberry, perhaps. Diligent searching might yield as many as five or six. I've never tasted anything like them, though, and likely never will again. That variety may well be extinct. It certainly wasn't commercial, and the strawberry plants were eventually eliminated on the grounds that they were a weed. My taste buds will never again be that sharp, either. The taste was incredibly sweet, like a sudden burst of the best of a fresh strawberry with the exact balance of tart to balance the sweet, it was a strawberry with an assertive presence, neither insipid nor aggressive.
Straight away, I showed Christine, my next door neighbor, the wild strawberries. She already knew about them, of course. She was considerably older than I was, 3 or 4 years at least. Christine taught me to draw a stalk of timothy grass carefully from the lower section, revealing the white, sweet inner stalk. This works with any number of types of grasses. My mom used to lecture me endlessly about not doing that. A dog might have peed on it. I couldn't understand the issue. After all, I was only eating the inner bits, not the outer pieces that were actually exposed to dogs. Mom also flipped when she found out that we were eating rhubarb that grew behind the outhouse at Christine's. I don't remember if the outhouse was still in use at that time. If it wasn't in use, then the house had only very recently gotten indoor plumbing. Again, I couldn't understand why Mom was upset. After all, the rhubarb would be ok, even if the soil it grew in was yucky. Besides, wasn't manure a good fertilizer? (There was a pasture on two sides of our house, and every time the manure spreader came, my parents would say this as a way of dealing with the smell.) The rhubarb had an irresistible taste, so incredibly sharp and tangy. Sometimes, to allay my feelings of guilt for ignoring my mom's lectures, we'd wash it off at the well, but mostly, we just ate it.
When my family moved to Pittsburgh, my best friend Anne was an even more avid gatherer than I was. We were gangly pre-adolescents, and wild early teens. We saw each other once a week at church, with a very occasional sleep-over. I think it was Anne that taught me that Queen Ann's Lace had a root which tasted a lot like a carrot. Actually, more like a parsnip, as I recall. We'd pull them up from the brush behind the church and eat them after we'd rubbed as much dirt off them as we could. (Wash them? We'd have to go into the church, and one of two horrible things would happen. Either we'd be forbidden to eat that dirty stuff, or one of our parents would be reminded that it was time to leave. Best to stay out of sight.) One season, there were blackberries and raspberries next to the creek, which was just down the hill from the church. True, it required finding one's way past pricker bushes and tromping through thick brush with poison ivy (well, at least, we believed it was poison ivy) and shying away from poison sumac to get there. It was a steep hill, and we were doing this in dresses with dress shoes and nylons. It was important not to get dirt on our hands or dresses. The dress shoes were a serious problem because they had slick soles. Sometimes, we'd resort to taking off our shoes and nylons, but that meant risking the poison ivy and parental disapproval. Usually, I ended up with at least one run in my nylons. I'd put polish on the run to keep it from getting worse, sometimes I could even keep it from being noticed.
Children's knowledge of wild edibles is part ancient lore and part superstition. I remember Christine lecturing me very solemnly on the dangers of toadstools. All toadstools, even the ones that were mushrooms. My mother did the same, but it was Christine that told me that just touching them with my tongue would cause me to drop dead on the spot. If I picked them, and then later stuck a finger in my mouth, I might die. We'd kick toadstools and fairy rings when we found them. The sensation of the toadstool tearing up out of the ground was neat. It wasn't a satisfying sort of thwunk, but there was a definite give, a terminal tear as the fungus lost its mooring. We felt virtuous; another danger destroyed.
Ann told me that the orange red berries of the mountain ash, or rowan tree if you wax more poetic, were poisonous. I'd pick them, and roll them around in my pockets, but I didn't eat them. They were a nice shape and size, and not soft and gooey, so you could carry them around in your pocket and run them through your fingers without worrying about staining your hands or the pockets. There were all sorts of other hard, inedible berries in the wastes in between yards in my neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Almost every yard was separated by a tangle of brush and trees that couldn't be tamed. It was usually at some ridiculous incline, and well protected with pricker bushes, retaining walls, hedges, and trees.
The brush belonged to us kids. We wouldn't dare trespass on someone else's lawn, and there was some dispute amongst us about where, exactly, someone's lawn began, but there was never any question that crawling around in the bracken was entirely within the rules. I didn't really have any friends in the neighborhood, so unless Anne was there for a sleep over (a rare occurrence), I tended to wander alone. Days when Mom kicked me out of the house rather than letting me stay in my room and read, I'd trek through the bush on my own, usually in a reverie, thinking about the book I was reading. I climbed trees. Well, really only one tree, because it was on our property so I didn't have to trespass to get to it. It was a grand tree, though, with places to sit for as long as my butt would hold out. (People who say that they love sitting in a tree because it's so comfortable are usually lying.) My usual method for getting through impassable tangles of pricker bushes was to simply push my way through. My arms and legs had scratches on them all summer long.
I think it was those self-same pricker bushes that had such satisfactory little berries. Hard and round, about an eighth of an inch in diameter, they pulled cleanly off the bush, and didn't have to be separated from their stems. I was still at the stage where I automatically pulled off leaves from any random plant as I walked. I gathered the berries in much the same way. I usually came home with my pockets full of them. I had no earthly use for them. They weren't edible, they weren't even pretty. I just liked having a bunch in my pocket to mess with while I walked. I did gnaw now and again on the occasional pine needle because I liked the taste. I still think that if you could make a perfume that smells like fresh pine in the summer, it would sell quite well. The hedge in front of our house was yew, and had fascinating berries. They were rare, and brilliantly red. They had a translucent opalescence to them. The berry was soft, and the center was drilled out. Almost the first thing Dad said when we moved in was that the yew berry was really hemlock, and we must stay well away from the berries. "Hemlock, like Socrates?" I asked. He said yes. I dutifully passed on the information to Anne and my sisters and anyone else that would let me. It felt very cool to know something that important. We picked the berries, of course, and looked at them, mashed them into things, dissected them, and so on, but no one tried to eat one. Any time a parent saw us with one of the yew berries, they'd lecture us about the poisonous nature of the fruit. We'd roll our eyes and say, "We know, we know. We're being careful." Now, why wasn't that a comfort for my parents, I ask you.
Ann was the one who knew about the special clover which, as an adult, I found out to be yellow wood sorrel, or oxalis. The leaves and stems have a sharp, sour lemon taste. It also grows seed pods, sometimes an inch long. If you catch them before they burst, they have a nice crunch, as well as that refreshing lemony taste. Best of all, it grew in my backyard. I remember carefully picking an entire bowl of seed pods, once, with Ann. There was also a neglected grape arbor in the backyard. Alas, it was pruned just past an inch of its life, and the red and white grape vines died. The concord grape vines survived, though. There were also two apple trees in the backyard. The grapes and the apples, though, belonged to the grown ups and we weren't allowed to pick and eat them. The apples in particular were sprayed with insecticides. We stole one or two, now and again, and shined them up against our jeans before eating them. I wonder how many poisons I've ingested during my adolescence. Very few of the solemn warnings I was given had any real effect on me.
Walking down the street just yesterday, there was an apple tree heavily burdened with little green apples. Last year, they didn't really ripen, nor were there so many. Without even stopping to think about it, I picked one off the tree as I passed, and nibbled it on the way home. Then I had some mulberries for dessert. Free food, it has a definite allure. And I do so love mulberries.
Only last year, I discovered that all children are not, by nature, hunter gatherers. I was walking along with DDB during wild grape season (which is after mulberry season). I'd snagged several bunches of wild grapes as we'd walked, much to his disapproval. Grape vines grow on cyclone fences rather satisfactorily, their broad leaves providing significant cover in the late spring that lasts until early autumn. No one cares about their fruit. Like mulberries, the grapes are commercially valueless. Wild grapes are incredibly tart, and almost all seed and skin. The actual fruit is a teeny bit of juicy grape, almost all tang, which you encounter while trying to maneuver the tough, inedible bits in your mouth into a position where they're easy to spit out. I reached out and snagged another bunch of wild grapes, and popped a couple in my mouth. Then I stopped and spit them out. They weren't grapes. I don't know what they were, but they tasted horrible and bitter. I looked again, and realized that the vine on the fence was not a grape vine, the leaves were obviously not grape leaves, and the vines were bright red.. I felt very stupid. My tongue didn't become numb, and my breathing continued to be easy, so I concluded that I hadn't been extremely stupid, just garden-variety didn't-look-before-I-leaped stupid.
"Those aren't grapes!" I said, personally aggrieved.
"No," agreed David, "what made you think that they were?"
"I don't know. They were growing on a vine. They looked just like grapes. I didn't look at the leaves." David continued to look grave. "You just disapprove of me grabbing fruit from other people's fences. Oh, come on. Every kid is a hunter gatherer at heart. Didn't you eat clover and wild berries when you were a kid?"
"Of course not!"
"'Of course not?' Why not?"
"You don't put strange things in your mouth. They might be poison."
They might be poison? What a bizarre response. It's true that mere moments ago, I had considered the possibility that I might have poisoned myself, but I never worry about it when browsing wild plants. I've casually eaten various odd bits of growing things most of my life. It's a kid thing, a secret lore that we passed on to each other. Foraging offers a feeling of freedom and independence; see, not everything I eat is given to me by my mom. The idea of running away to the forest and living on roots and berries was romantic, and some days almost painfully attractive.
Our lore was not just kid stuff, of course. I think it was my father who first showed me wild strawberries. When we lived in Upstate New York (no, no, really Upstate, think Canada) in a very small town, the library was just across the road. Street, technically, Main Street. There was a slight rise, about four steps worth, to the Library lawn. On that rise various tangles of plants grew, including strawberries. The strawberries were tiny, half the size of a raspberry, perhaps. Diligent searching might yield as many as five or six. I've never tasted anything like them, though, and likely never will again. That variety may well be extinct. It certainly wasn't commercial, and the strawberry plants were eventually eliminated on the grounds that they were a weed. My taste buds will never again be that sharp, either. The taste was incredibly sweet, like a sudden burst of the best of a fresh strawberry with the exact balance of tart to balance the sweet, it was a strawberry with an assertive presence, neither insipid nor aggressive.
Straight away, I showed Christine, my next door neighbor, the wild strawberries. She already knew about them, of course. She was considerably older than I was, 3 or 4 years at least. Christine taught me to draw a stalk of timothy grass carefully from the lower section, revealing the white, sweet inner stalk. This works with any number of types of grasses. My mom used to lecture me endlessly about not doing that. A dog might have peed on it. I couldn't understand the issue. After all, I was only eating the inner bits, not the outer pieces that were actually exposed to dogs. Mom also flipped when she found out that we were eating rhubarb that grew behind the outhouse at Christine's. I don't remember if the outhouse was still in use at that time. If it wasn't in use, then the house had only very recently gotten indoor plumbing. Again, I couldn't understand why Mom was upset. After all, the rhubarb would be ok, even if the soil it grew in was yucky. Besides, wasn't manure a good fertilizer? (There was a pasture on two sides of our house, and every time the manure spreader came, my parents would say this as a way of dealing with the smell.) The rhubarb had an irresistible taste, so incredibly sharp and tangy. Sometimes, to allay my feelings of guilt for ignoring my mom's lectures, we'd wash it off at the well, but mostly, we just ate it.
When my family moved to Pittsburgh, my best friend Anne was an even more avid gatherer than I was. We were gangly pre-adolescents, and wild early teens. We saw each other once a week at church, with a very occasional sleep-over. I think it was Anne that taught me that Queen Ann's Lace had a root which tasted a lot like a carrot. Actually, more like a parsnip, as I recall. We'd pull them up from the brush behind the church and eat them after we'd rubbed as much dirt off them as we could. (Wash them? We'd have to go into the church, and one of two horrible things would happen. Either we'd be forbidden to eat that dirty stuff, or one of our parents would be reminded that it was time to leave. Best to stay out of sight.) One season, there were blackberries and raspberries next to the creek, which was just down the hill from the church. True, it required finding one's way past pricker bushes and tromping through thick brush with poison ivy (well, at least, we believed it was poison ivy) and shying away from poison sumac to get there. It was a steep hill, and we were doing this in dresses with dress shoes and nylons. It was important not to get dirt on our hands or dresses. The dress shoes were a serious problem because they had slick soles. Sometimes, we'd resort to taking off our shoes and nylons, but that meant risking the poison ivy and parental disapproval. Usually, I ended up with at least one run in my nylons. I'd put polish on the run to keep it from getting worse, sometimes I could even keep it from being noticed.
Children's knowledge of wild edibles is part ancient lore and part superstition. I remember Christine lecturing me very solemnly on the dangers of toadstools. All toadstools, even the ones that were mushrooms. My mother did the same, but it was Christine that told me that just touching them with my tongue would cause me to drop dead on the spot. If I picked them, and then later stuck a finger in my mouth, I might die. We'd kick toadstools and fairy rings when we found them. The sensation of the toadstool tearing up out of the ground was neat. It wasn't a satisfying sort of thwunk, but there was a definite give, a terminal tear as the fungus lost its mooring. We felt virtuous; another danger destroyed.
Ann told me that the orange red berries of the mountain ash, or rowan tree if you wax more poetic, were poisonous. I'd pick them, and roll them around in my pockets, but I didn't eat them. They were a nice shape and size, and not soft and gooey, so you could carry them around in your pocket and run them through your fingers without worrying about staining your hands or the pockets. There were all sorts of other hard, inedible berries in the wastes in between yards in my neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Almost every yard was separated by a tangle of brush and trees that couldn't be tamed. It was usually at some ridiculous incline, and well protected with pricker bushes, retaining walls, hedges, and trees.
The brush belonged to us kids. We wouldn't dare trespass on someone else's lawn, and there was some dispute amongst us about where, exactly, someone's lawn began, but there was never any question that crawling around in the bracken was entirely within the rules. I didn't really have any friends in the neighborhood, so unless Anne was there for a sleep over (a rare occurrence), I tended to wander alone. Days when Mom kicked me out of the house rather than letting me stay in my room and read, I'd trek through the bush on my own, usually in a reverie, thinking about the book I was reading. I climbed trees. Well, really only one tree, because it was on our property so I didn't have to trespass to get to it. It was a grand tree, though, with places to sit for as long as my butt would hold out. (People who say that they love sitting in a tree because it's so comfortable are usually lying.) My usual method for getting through impassable tangles of pricker bushes was to simply push my way through. My arms and legs had scratches on them all summer long.
I think it was those self-same pricker bushes that had such satisfactory little berries. Hard and round, about an eighth of an inch in diameter, they pulled cleanly off the bush, and didn't have to be separated from their stems. I was still at the stage where I automatically pulled off leaves from any random plant as I walked. I gathered the berries in much the same way. I usually came home with my pockets full of them. I had no earthly use for them. They weren't edible, they weren't even pretty. I just liked having a bunch in my pocket to mess with while I walked. I did gnaw now and again on the occasional pine needle because I liked the taste. I still think that if you could make a perfume that smells like fresh pine in the summer, it would sell quite well. The hedge in front of our house was yew, and had fascinating berries. They were rare, and brilliantly red. They had a translucent opalescence to them. The berry was soft, and the center was drilled out. Almost the first thing Dad said when we moved in was that the yew berry was really hemlock, and we must stay well away from the berries. "Hemlock, like Socrates?" I asked. He said yes. I dutifully passed on the information to Anne and my sisters and anyone else that would let me. It felt very cool to know something that important. We picked the berries, of course, and looked at them, mashed them into things, dissected them, and so on, but no one tried to eat one. Any time a parent saw us with one of the yew berries, they'd lecture us about the poisonous nature of the fruit. We'd roll our eyes and say, "We know, we know. We're being careful." Now, why wasn't that a comfort for my parents, I ask you.
Ann was the one who knew about the special clover which, as an adult, I found out to be yellow wood sorrel, or oxalis. The leaves and stems have a sharp, sour lemon taste. It also grows seed pods, sometimes an inch long. If you catch them before they burst, they have a nice crunch, as well as that refreshing lemony taste. Best of all, it grew in my backyard. I remember carefully picking an entire bowl of seed pods, once, with Ann. There was also a neglected grape arbor in the backyard. Alas, it was pruned just past an inch of its life, and the red and white grape vines died. The concord grape vines survived, though. There were also two apple trees in the backyard. The grapes and the apples, though, belonged to the grown ups and we weren't allowed to pick and eat them. The apples in particular were sprayed with insecticides. We stole one or two, now and again, and shined them up against our jeans before eating them. I wonder how many poisons I've ingested during my adolescence. Very few of the solemn warnings I was given had any real effect on me.
Walking down the street just yesterday, there was an apple tree heavily burdened with little green apples. Last year, they didn't really ripen, nor were there so many. Without even stopping to think about it, I picked one off the tree as I passed, and nibbled it on the way home. Then I had some mulberries for dessert. Free food, it has a definite allure. And I do so love mulberries.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 12:37 pm (UTC)The big event for my family, though, was camping in the Indiana Dunes, which are full of blueberries. My parents would bring a box of Bisquick, and send me and my sister into the woods to gather blueberries, and we would have blueberry pancakes for breakfast most mornings.
But I always thought of blueberries as a wilderness fruit. Mulberries could be picked and eaten right outside of almost every house (and all were citified) that I ever lived in as a child. And I ate plenty of those mulberries.