It is such sights that make blueberrying the pleasure it is. But the berries, for all they have the powder of the sky on their fresh sides, are not the wonders that raspberries and strawberries are. They have flavor, all right. But it is a stout, downright one. They can stand up under cooking. And you might as well put them and their colorful vigors into muffins or pies. Or have you ever tried them in a plain vanilla cake? They are something to make the heart flutter there. And, of course, a blueberry pie, if the crust is flaky as ribbon candy, is one of this world's best things, eaten hot right out of the oven, with the berries all singing still at full cry like the twenty-four blackbirds that got cooked in a pie.
And last to come, when summer is fading, are the blackberries.
They are the biggest berries and the hardest to pick. You really need to go after them in a tank. The bushes are spiked with steel, and they tear you apart. They are living barbed-wire entanglements. They band together and make thickets a rabbit cannot get through. But you can take them by side assault. Work gingerly up to their flanks and snatch off a black cluster of black-honey-beads here and there. And they fill up fast.
Once you get these black beauties home, eat them at once with sugar. They are too negroid for cream. And cream can do nothing to improve their masculine flavor. Their taste is all their own and the heartiest among berries. But it is as jam that they become their richest and most masculine best. Concentrated by being cooked down and down, they grow up in stature. And their carry-over value to the heart of a Winter's night, spread cold on hot buttered toast, is something amazing. They bring back the summer into a world of drifted snow. Of course, wild strawberries could do this even better, but nobody I know has ever been brave enough to wait till winter to eat wild strawberries! I have heard of such people, but I think they are fictitious.
Blackberries have been known to enter the field of the spirits. I had an old aunt who fermented them and strained them, and she turned out a cordial that made her nephews sit up and take notice. Sit up and take notice with shining eyes. They went out of her house, from two glasses of her wild spirits of blackberry, with much spirit in them!
No, berries aren't such bad eating!
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