Say the word blackberry to my mother and I’m 100 percent sure she’ll reminisce about one of the few fresh fruits she ate while growing up as a “city” girl in Lexington. Around my grandmother’s kitchen in the late 1930’s and 40’s fresh fruit was rare except from late April to October when fresh rhubarb plants sent up stiff pink stalks, blackberry bushes, and cherry, peach, and apple trees brimmed with fruit, and the neighbor’s grape arbors hung heavy with Concord grapes. Neighbors shared the abundant, but limited varieties of, fresh fruit with each other and all worked hard to pick, wash, eat, and preserve the fruit while it lasted.
On a hot July morning my mother and grandmother picked a pail-full of berries. For a few days they’d eat fresh with sugar all the berries they could stomach without getting a belly-ache, and proceed to bake a cobbler, or two. Then my grandmother preserved blackberry jam in small glistening jars topped with paraffin wax. Her intent, of course, was to extend this short-lived flavor of summer into the fall where blackberry jam was spread on hot biscuits, and into the Christmas holiday where the jam reappeared as an ingredient in a tall cake spread thick with soft caramel icing.
Say the word blackberry to one of my older, baby boomer sister’s and I’m 50 percent sure they’d follow along the same thought process, remembering the times we picked fat, thumbnail-sized berries from the same prickly bushes hanging over the back fence behind my grandmother’s house. Blackberry picking time was the hottest time of summer, but we helped my grandmother harvest the berries before the birds did. After our short, but fruitful, picking session we relaxed on Mamaw’s sleeping porch with our purple-stained fingers wrapped around a sweaty glass of iced tea. Later in the evening, we listened to the Red’s game on her transistor radio, ate cobbler and ice cream, and brushed frosty pink fingernail polish on our itchy chigger bites.
Now for the heartbreaking part of this story: Say the word blackberry to my college-aged niece, my teenage nephew, or my children, and I’m 98 percent certain the first thing they’ll mention is the small hand-held device used for talking on the phone, checking e-mail, or posting a status update to Facebook. To them, blackberries are electric, portable, and come in a wide variety of sizes and colors. And they can’t be baked in a pie.
For my Mom picking blackberries meant fresh fruit. For me picking blackberries was a memorable part of July. Sure, we all returned hot, stained, and insect bit, but summer wasn’t summer without picking blackberries. As far as my kids go, we, nor their grandmothers, have a blackberry bush to perpetuate this summertime memory. When we want the traditional blackberry-taste of summer we buy berries at a farmer’s market or go to a u-pick berry farm. (Although when I mentioned this to the best male cook I know he stood ready to go buy and plant some cultivated blackberries. Time will tell.)
Depending on where you live, blackberries typically start to ripen near the end of June or the 1st week in July, and because they wait for no one, and the birds wait for them, you have to be ready to pick when they ripen. (Check out www.pickyourown.org for a location near you.) If you are lucky enough to do some blackberry picking , handle the berries gently and pack them in shallow containers to avoid squishing. Refrigerate for up to two days. Just before you cook or eat them, rinse in a gentle stream of cool water.
Sit down and share a cold beverage with someone who remembers blackberry-picking days and you’re bound to hear a few hot, juicy stories. If you have youngsters in your life, find somewhere to pick, or buy, fresh Kentucky blackberries so they can enjoy this short-seasoned, summertime fruit. If you have blackberries that need to be picked, give me a shout. I’ll gather some kids who need to taste this experience, stained fingers, chigger bites, and all. I can’t expect them to fully understand what fresh fruit meant to their grandmother and great-grandmother, but connecting them with fresh blackberry bushes will help them appreciate the fruits of their labor, and create summertime memories they can tell their friends about even though they’re too young to own a BlackBerry.