3 days ago
The four berry recipes you need this summer – from tarte aux fraises to a simple raspberry sorbet
I've hunted all over northern and central Europe for wild berries, either picking them myself or paying for the fruits of someone else's labour. I eventually got to eat the hardest to find, the cloudberries of Scandinavia (the colour of salmon flesh), on a farm in Norway. I say farm but most of the food they dealt with was wild – fish (Arctic char and trout), reindeer, wild mushrooms and berries. Our first meal there was waffles with ice cream and cloudberries; the berries taste of musky soft apple flesh and were scooped from a big plastic ice-cream tub full of them and their syrup. Our eyes were as wide as dinner plates as our host ladled them on to our waffles. I know they're rare, but clearly not way up high in northern Norway.
Even the sweet and simple strawberry – a berry of childhood as it has none of the tartness we come to like when we're older – weaves a kind of magic. In Iceland, where they're grown in geothermally powered greenhouses, you would think that they had special powers. In Scandinavia strawberries are associated with Frigg, the Norse goddess of marriage, who was so possessive that she wanted them all to herself. The Vikings are said to have believed that when a child dies it ascends to heaven as a strawberry. The seeds symbolised the souls of babies. That's not such a sweet idea but it chimes with Goethe's belief that only children and birds knew how strawberries should taste.
I find the best in all of them. Strawberries are innocent, I get the tartest cultivated blueberries I can find, cook with wild blackberries when they're in season and love the raspberry most of all – well, apart from the Arctic raspberry, which is known as the 'prince of berries' in Russia. That one's still on my list of 'berries to eat'.
