The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [58]
Once the tour was complete, I had more than doubled the amount of wildlife that was already in my fridge. The wild garlic was one of the most useful finds of the day. I would use it in place of regular garlic throughout the month, and its thin, mild-tasting shoots were an easy substitute for fresh chives as a garnish. I concocted a simple salad of dandelion greens as soon as I got home and used garlic and the hedge mustard, minced up finely, to flavor the dressing.
About a month and a half later, while biking in the park, I passed the Boathouse and suddenly recalled the date. It was just then late July. I pressed the brakes and swerved onto the gravel path just behind the pond. When I came to the bush, sure enough, it was brimming with berries that were just beginning to turn from bright bloodred to dark purplish-black. I picked some and found that the darkest ones of the bunch were the sweetest and fell off the branch the easiest. This must be a black raspberry bush, I concluded. I took the blackest ones of the bunch and put them into my emptied water bottle.
Exhilarated by the discovery, I went home and ate a bowl full of homemade ice cream with raspberries on top. For the next few weeks, I made several trips to the same raspberry brambles, observing each time the berries that had gradually turned deep black-ripe and seizing on the opportunity every time.
Knowing about the hidden raspberry bush somehow felt incredible, like I had my own little secret tucked away in the park. It also felt like a thing of the past. People must have had the same feeling, I thought—that personally fulfilling connection with nature upon finding one of its choicest treats, for as far back as human history dates. There is something dangerously beautiful about wild foods when they’re not deadly. Perhaps because there’s that risk attached to wildness that makes discovering something as delicious as the common raspberry in a forest ten times more magical than finding it in any other setting. There is also a preciousness about foods that can be sniffed out only by hand—wild mushrooms like truffles and chanterelles. I thought about the pleasant surprise that Thoreau must have had when he stumbled upon a cache of raspberries or another familiar food while living on Walden Pond. I could imagine the smug satisfaction it must have given people centuries ago, before the domestication of many of these crops. Raspberries have been growing wild in North America for ages. I wondered whether Pocahontas had led John Smith to the choicest fruits to pick in the New World, if they ever had a thing together at all. I wondered what would have happened if D. H. Lawrence’s heroine, Lady Chatterley, had found a raspberry bush while embracing the wilderness instead of her gruff groundskeeper. Would she have left Wragby to become a confectioner instead?
While I was lost in this state of fantasy, picking black raspberries from my “private” bush one afternoon, I suddenly heard a voice behind me.
“Hey—why are you picking them berries?”
I turned around; the voice belonged to a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boy wearing long jean shorts and sneakers that looked about five sizes too big for his feet. Just behind him, a teenage girl sitting on a bench was craning her neck to watch us.
“Because they’re good,” I said.
“You can eat them?” he asked, eyes wide and a little frightened-looking.
“Yep, they’re raspberries,” I said.
“Those?