Raspberry Memories
It’s an overcast, July morning. The kind of summer day where your clothes are still damp from the night before. The kind where the air is heavy and still, and you whisper because sound travels farther than it normally would. From my deck, I can hear the hum of boats far away at the other end of the lake, the warble of frogs in the long grasses of the ditch, and the crunching of feet on the gravel foreshadowing the imminent arrival of early-morning pedestrians making their way around the loop of the peninsula. The dove gray sky weighs down on me, enhancing the many shades of green present in the Northern Ontario landscape: the deep darkness of the evergreen, the yellowy fluorescent green of the grasses, and the more muted ones of the raspberry bushes. There other colours too: the yellow buttercups, the white daisies, and the red raspberries. The latter are already ripe and full, some barely hanging on to the plants that sway clumsily in the breeze that brings moments of reprieve to the sticky humidity.
Raspberries were an important part of my childhood. My siblings, cousins, mother, aunt, and I spent countless hours picking them in the laneway to our cottage.
Picking wild berries is an example of a foodway and food practice that has evolve overtime. Raspberries were once an important part of the pantry. Growing up during the Depression in the rural farming community of Astorville, my grandfather remembers them as the base of the jams they consumed throughout the year and that provided a sweet treat during the winters. Today, we can buy raspberries that are shipped from all over. We don’t have to depend on them being in season. In this respect, we can make traditional foods that have fresh raspberries as an ingredient throughout the year. As this blog will explore in other posts, this access to fresh ingredients allows certain traditional foods to continue while others don’t.
The other factor that we can begin to explore with raspberries is the question of time. It takes time to pick this fruit which is smaller than the domestic variety you'd get in the grocery store, you can grow in your garden, or that you’d get in a pick-it-yourself place like Leisure Farms. Time is major a factor that people bring up when speaking of traditional foods. It takes time to make the foods people consider special and it takes even more time if you are going to harvest the ingredients needed to make them yourself. This may explain why children were sent to get the berries or enlisted to help in the process. This was (and still is) labour children could (and still can) perform.
If a tradition is to continue, people need to enjoy doing it. As my participants often mentioned, traditions mean planning and effort, and so there has to be a sense of appreciation and joy that comes from the work that is put into sourcing ingredients, making the food, and consuming it. Raspberry picking, for many, is an event all in itself.
If you’ve gone berry picking in the wild, you know that doing so is like embarking on a magical journey that you are the hero. You start on the edge of that liminal space between the sunny, open field and the thick, shoulder high bush. The first berries are small, but you can see the next ones, just a few steps in. The clumps are thicker there. You move slowly, tentatively so you don’t knock them all down. Each new step shows you more and more fruit that always seem bigger, riper, redder from far away than they do when you get there. Urged on by the quest to get the best yield, you move toward the next clump and the next one, sweeping aside thorny stalks, side-stepping spider webs, dodging thistles, and battling mosquitoes and deerflies to triumphantly fill your bucket. Before you know it, the maze you’ve created has erased your starting place. You have to follow your path back out, careful that you don’t accidentally tip your bucket over as you itch at the shallow scratches the bushes have left on your bare arms. You meet up with the others who have all taken their own routes and compare your journeys: the quantity and size of the berries, the objects that you discovered that had been lost to the invasive plants like rusty, old farm parts or discarded household items. You create stories about what the objects could be, who used them, why they were left to rot, who lived on this property, what they did, where they could be now. Where else can you go on such an adventure for free!
During my PhD interviews, some of the participants who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s remembered being dropped off and left for hours to pick berries in remote locations by parents heading to work or town. Others shared that would bike off to spend an afternoon picking berries far from home. The older kids watched the younger ones. Parents trusted that everything would be okay. That sense of adventure was still there, as well as the sense of accomplishment when they got back and shared not only their harvest, but also their stories.
I would certainly say that this sense of freedom and adventure has changed with time. Today, I don’t send my kids out to pick berries. We don’t have access to the big patches I had as a kid. There are certainly enough berries along the road to make a pie, but they’re on many different properties and we would need to ask permission. We could go to my brother’s where there are still bushes, but I haven’t been able to instill the same sense of adventure I had when I was a kid. We went berry picking because there was either nothing else to do, it was the best of what there was to do, or because we were asked to by our mothers. It was an activity that broke up the day, allowed us to be on our own, or it guaranteed us pie for dessert. So my kids won’t have the same relationship with berry picking I had. This shift is another important element to understanding how traditions shift over time.
Can we still pick raspberries today? Of course! Can we purchase them fresh and frozen from the grocery story? You betcha! Is the process of walking down organized rows in a pick-it-yourself field or through the produce aisle of a store different than going out into nature to procure them? Absolutely. Access to raspberries, like so many of the ingredients in our traditional foods and foodways, has evolve over time. The question to ask oneself is: To what extent does this change matter?
This blog post is a way to reflect on what picking raspberries meant to my own development as a creative and innovative person. Do you know how hard it is to get two yogurt containers full of berries back while peddling your bike? Or how frustrating it is to fill your bucket then swat at a mosquito and see half of it fall to the muddy ground? We had to devise all kinds of systems as kids. We learnt to overcome loss. We learnt that reward comes from hard work and that success doesn’t happen in a straight line. Even if my children won’t experience these same lessons in the exact same way, they can hear about them when we make raspberry pie or jam or other foods together.
Raspberry Cereal
Raspberry cereal isn’t really cereal. It’s just raspberries, milk, and sugar. It’s something we would eat for breakfast at the cottage or as a snack in the afternoon to either use up leftover berries or to do something with them when we hadn’t picked enough to make something bigger like pie.
An amount of wild, domestic, or frozen raspberries
You decide the amount. In my opinion, the more raspberries the better!
An amount of granulated sugar
I always eat this with white, granulated sugar, but it would work with any kind of sugar though a liquid like maple syrup or honey will not give you the same texture.
An amount of milk
I recommend filling the bowl to about halfway up the berries but, again, you decide. The more milk you put in the bowl, the more you have left afterwards, and it does taste good with the sugar and berry juice.
Looking for other ideas to engage your kids while you’re picking berries or want to take your students out to a local berry patch? Read Raspberry Lessons: Insects in my Teaching Extensions section of the website!
