Last week I made jam from blueberries I had frozen last summer, when it was just too hot to consider canning. Stirring the pot reminded me of other lovely ways and words with the blue fruit.
“The way the night tastes” is how the U.S. poet W.S. Merwin described blueberries. Another poet, Mary Oliver, wrote about her longing for her past, and the blueberry patch where she saw a beautiful lone doe stamp her hoof at her in warning as she picked berries. Robert Frost recalled the subversive joy to be felt in being the first to find a berry patch. Mary Szybist wrote, “What taste the bright world has,” the joy in eating bowls of blueberries outdoors, a joy that her hands or existence had no part in creating.
Blueberries are equally beloved by nutritionists for their status as a superfood carrying high levels of antioxidants bound to lower blood pressure, improve memory function, reduce oxidation of LDL cholesterol and boost heart health.
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Beyond boosting our health and spirits, those fat purple berries can leave indelible stains on our memory. I remember going up the Banff gondola when I was no more than seven. At the top, in the café, we had breakfast: buttermilk pancakes all around. On our table was a large cruet of blueberry syrup that the waiter replaced without questions each time the seven of us glugged it empty. At the time I could not have identified that musky blue syrup as tasting of the night, as Merwin did, but its memory has stayed with me.
As a youngster, I picked fruit for pocket money in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island and in the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver. Harder than the stoop labour of picking strawberries, more frustrating than clothes-shredding raspberries on their thorned canes, the blueberries that clung tenaciously to the twigs of their shrubby bushes became the bane of my fruit-picking days.
A few years later, as I waited for my name to come up for admittance into cooking school in Vancouver, I worked as a letter carrier. After sorting the mail for our walks and seeing the canvas bags off safely with the drivers, a gang of us from Station D would trek over to Addie’s tiny café at Sixth and Fir, under the Granville Street Bridge overpass. Addie would pull her pans out of the oven minutes before our arrival, and it was always a dogfight for her still-steaming blueberry muffins with the crusty tops and tender berry-loaded innards.
Then there was the blueberry slice that my friend Winnie made and served still warm from the oven when I came over to collect my boys after school. At the time I was in the throes of madness, as my then-husband and I opened our restaurant in Calgary, a little 37-seater that would become my obsession and pride. Winnie gathered up my little sons from preschool along with her twins and rolled them into her family’s after-school snacktime and games. I never did satisfactorily solve the endless conundrum of working mother and childcare, but for a while Winnie stepped into the breach as a loving substitute at a time when my attention was focused elsewhere.
Rhumtopf, jam, syrup, sauce, ice cream, pound cake, galette, pie, ricotta pancakes, salad, barbecue baste, chutney, cheesecake, cobbler, crisp, cake — it’s a long list, what a cook can do with a berry. First we eat, then we trade stories about the berries we have picked.
Winnie’s Blueberry Slice
Not quite a cake, more like a filled cobbler, this lush dessert loaded with fat blueberries will be juicier if you use frozen berries, and will need 15 minutes more in the oven than with fresh.
Makes one 10-inch (30-cm) cake.
Berries:
- 3 cups blueberries
- 1/3 cup white sugar
- 1 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
- a grating of fresh nutmeg
Cake:
- ½ cup white sugar
- ½ c. unsalted butter, softened
- 1 lemon, zest only
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp. vanilla extract
- 1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
- 2 Tbsp. poppyseeds
- ½ tsp. baking soda
- salt to taste
- ¾ cup buttermilk or yogurt
Glaze:
- 1/3 cup icing sugar
- 3-4 Tbsp. lemon or orange juice
Line the bottom and sides of a 10-inch springform pan with parchment. Set the oven at 375 F. In a small bowl, stir together the berries, sugar, flour and nutmeg. Set aside.
Cream the sugar and butter on high speed using a handheld or countertop mixer, then add the lemon zest, egg and vanilla. Mix well. Add the dry ingredients alternately with the buttermilk or yogurt over three additions, starting and ending with dry ingredients. Spread the batter over the base of the springform and up the sides to a height of one inch. Gently spread the berry mixture over the centre of the batter. Bake for about 45 minutes, or until the cake is cooked through.
Remove the cake from the oven, let stand for 30 minutes, then remove the springform ring. Mix together the icing sugar and juice, then drizzle the glaze over the outer edge of the cake. Serve warm.
