This is the time of year when I think more often than usual about Beatrice Ross Buszek, the Nova Scotian author of the "Connection" cookbooks. Starting in 1977 with the publication of The Cranberry Connection, she went on to write about blueberries, strawberries, the sugar bush (maple syrup) and apples. Her last cookbook was to have been Other Berries I Have Known.
As I think of the "other" berries that will soon appear in gardens, in the wild, at U-pick farms, in farmers' markets and at roadside stands, I sometimes wonder how Beebee would have treated the raspberries she would carefully pick, undaunted by the shrub's thorns.
Surely there would have been a chapter (or chapters) on red and black currants, and one of my favourites, the gooseberry. She would have found appropriate ways to use them all. I can just see her adding a few to salads, puddings and cakes and, particularly, making them into jams or jellies. Then she would have had fun inventing regional names for her dishes.
I don't know if she had a source of partridge berries and bakeapples but had she written the book, she would have sought them out, possibly travelling to Newfoundland and Labrador-largely the Atlantic home of these elusive delicacies.
It wouldn't surprise me if she had her own "secret" source of wild blackberries, although the clusters of tiny drupelets that once grew prolifically on thorny shrubs are becoming more scarce as lands are turned to other uses. I can just see her heading out early in the morning (the best time for picking), keeping watch over her shoulder to make sure she wasn't being followed by another blackberry fancier. Or am I just romanticizing?
I feel quite certain that cherries would have found space in the book of berries, and she likely would have included a recipe for chokecherry jelly.
But would she have had the patience required to de-stalk the very small purple elderberry? Patience, perhaps, but time would likely have been the deciding factor. Better to use her time picking serviceberries: in the west, Saskatoon berries and in Atlantic Canada, Indian pears or Indian plums.
Other Berries I Have Known is a book that should have been written-the recipes that follow continue Beebee's tradition of celebrating our berry bounty.
