It was easy locating America, once those early navigators got somewhere off on the Atlantic Ocean on a fine day.
All they had to do was to follow their noses. They smelled it. And those early explorers had a nose for a good thing. The reason America smelled more like Araby the Blest than Araby herself was that America was covered with wild strawberries. It was wild strawberries that led Captain John Smith to that meadow which was to become Jamestown. So our country began on the sweet foundation of those pimpled, dimpled rubies that hang in clusters.
It was the best foundation any country could ask for.
Doubtless God could have made a better berry, the old Master of Eton used to say, but doubtless God never did. And if that goes for tame, tabby garden strawberries, what would the Master have said if he could have been turned loose in an American meadow where wild ones grew? It is a pleasant thought—the Master of Eton on all fours, with his mortarboard full of berries, his mouth red with juice, and ecstasy in his old eyes. I should like to see the Master I know on all fours that way!
Wild strawberries are the best berries of summer, and they come first. It is like life. They are as a first love. All the later ones are anti-climaxes. It was that way with mine. I have never, for sheer breathlessness and abandon, been able to match that first love I knew. It was when I was seven. And of course I was young.
Though they are an all-fours berry, wild strawberries aren't hard to pick, and you don't mind at all going on your hands and knees in green velvet. The weather isn't old enough yet to be hot, either, and a meadow starred with daisies and buttercups is a mighty pleasant place to go on your knees.
First you lift your nose and read the wind. When you have located your game, you sink to your hands and knees, part the grasses with your fingers, and begin. Personally, I strap my pail so it hangs just under my chin. So I have both hands free and the comforting presence of the world's best fragrance under my nose all the time to spur me on. And, of course, I might get hungry. Well, you part the grass, and there are the small candelabras hung with red fires. You go to it. It is easy picking field strawberries because they grow in company on one stem. You get half a dozen at one pluck. Naturally the largest berry is found to be over-ripe always, and you are afraid it will fall off and be lost, and, anyway, it would crush up under the weight of the others. So you eat the biggest berry at once.
The berries fill up fast. I can pick a twelve-quart pail of them, if the going is good, and if the airy honey the daisies send out doesn't lull me to sleep almost at once. And I am no hurrying man. I like to take my pleasures slow.
It's what has to be done to the berries after you pick them that slows wild strawberries down and keeps our fields from being depopulated of them. It is the hulling. But I never do it. I leave that to my wife. It is her province. It is her right. After all, that is what women are for. I am the hunter. I bring in the game. It is her part to dress my kill. It takes my wife five hours to hull the pailful I pick in an hour. That's about the proportion. And after the hulls and the stems are cleared away, my twelve quarts have shrunk to two. But two solid quarts of pure wild strawberries would make a pretty good dowry for any woman.
The preparation of the berries comes next. This is where art comes in, and justifies its existence to the world. Art multiplies the essential taste of field strawberries by three. The berries are not to be cooked. They are to be eaten alive. People have been known to cook wild strawberries, but they have all been hung, drawn, and quartered long, long ago. But the berries are not to be eaten au naturel. Not naked. Not in the nude. Though not to be cooked, they are, in a sense, to be concocted.
Get a pestle of white pine. No other wood will do, for any other wood will taint the berries. Get an earthen dish, broad on the base. Nothing but earthen will do. Squash your small berries to a red pulp. Some people may lift their hands in horror. But wait! The essence of wild strawberries does not come into fullest bloom until the berries are crushed. A part of the magic is in the seeds, and you must release that. You have no idea what sweetness is to come out of this adversity. This is a necessary preparation to a marriage that is soon to take place. So crush the berries up. Add sugar to the amount of about one half the pulp.
And now comes the wedding! You now add cream. Two quarts of it. And when I say cream, I mean cream. It does not come in bottles. I mean the thick, yellow, day-old-kind, which you can fold over as you would heavy velvet, and which is just beginning to think of going sour. I mean the kind of cream that has risen on old-fashioned wide pans of milk, innocent of ice and its demoralizing and degenerating influence, on the low shelves in a dark pantry. If the milk below it is slightly turned, so much the better for the cream. With a wooden spoon—no metal must touch this concoction—stir the two quarts of cream into two quarts or better of your crushed rubies. When the mass is as pink as the shy wild-rose, take the pan and set it down in the gloom of the cellar-way for a whole night. Leave it to glory and the hand of the Creator! This strawberry cream of yours must age. Old Lady Time is your cook. And she will call into service airy angels that have begun to stir in the cream, bubbles of life already in the dance which precedes the souring of milk, and they will do a mysterious thing to your sugar and berries. They will call out the souls of them.
It is best to padlock the cellar-door. People who would never think of theft on ordinary occasions will break and enter, will smash in your door as they never would for gold ingots, to get at this wild-rose of a pan of strawberry cream.
Next noon, you bring up your flat crock, set it in the center of your table, equidistant from all and buttressed about with hot cream-of-tartar biscuits drenched in new butter, call in your very best friends, and fall to! This strawberry cream is the main dish, mark you, the only dish. It would be a sacrilege and an abdomination to have any other. There is no other dish in the universe to go with it. Use the biscuits as upholstery, and sail in! Sail is the word. For if anyone leaves this table without enjoying the profound conviction that he is wearing wings on his shoulders, wings on his temples, wings on both thighs, and wings on both heels, he is a hopeless lump of clay and no delicate eating will ever set him aflame.
Wild-strawberry cream is the high tide of summer, the tip-top highwater mark. After that, life is bound to slant off.
Yet there are some pretty fair later berries to slant off with gracefully. Raspberries come next. I mean wild raspberries. All the berries in this essay of mine are wild. Wild berries are to tame as the sun is to the moon. Of course, some people have to get along with the moon, but they are rather pindling people.
By raspberry time it is hot—oven-hot. You have to put the biggest rhubarb leaf you can get under your hat, to ward off the sun's rays. And you have to wear stout pants, or skirt. For raspberries grow in no such pleasant places as meadows. They get into skeletons of dead trees, into ravines, and around ledges.
But Illustrated by George Shellhase there's no sense courting sunstroke; so I'd start late in a July afternoon, and take my sweet time at picking.
Go to a place where the woods have been cut for about five years. Three years or four are not enough, for the brush will still have too much bite and gristle left in it. Go where the litter of boughs breaks when you step on it. Go right into the heart of the raspberry patch. Pay no attention to the little fellows that shine plain in the sun. Leave them for the robins. Go in deep. And when you get there, unwind your hair or your pants from barbed hooks of the raspberry vines, find a good wide log, and sit down.
Sitting down is the secret of good raspberrying. It is also easier on your pants and nerves, by the way. Raspberries call for a sitting posture. Sitting down pickers have all the luck. For once you have sunk into this green gloom, out of the sun, and recovered your serenity, you begin to see things. What you see is a wonder. All around you, over your head and reaching away into green infinity are the hearts of the woodland, hearts full of summer. The big raspberries are never in the sun, never at the tops of the bushes. They are too opulent for that. They hang here big as a robin's heart. Plump with beads of delicate juice, these garnet thimbles of spice betray themselves to your eyes.
The first thing to do is to eat about a pint of them. This really saves time. For once you have done it, you won't be tempted to eat any more as you pick, and you won't have to use your judgment on each handful to see whether the berries are too ripe to risk in the pail or not. But I warn you to be careful of spice-bugs. They are the color of the raspberry leaves, they look like leaves, they have the same crinkles on their edges. Once you bite into one, you will taste an ungodly taste that you may carry to your grave. So be on guard.
From your center of gravity where you sit, you can fill your pail in an hour or two, by expert rotation on your axis—with intervals, of course, when you move to a new base and rotate on that in turn. And then, unstruck by the sun, comparatively whole in your limbs and skin, you will go home leisurely at the hour when the evening thrushes are beginning to tune up.
You can get your thick country cream and go through the same ritual as with the strawberries, and—if you are a Spartan—wait till tomorrow for your feast. But since raspberries are not quite so tasty as wild strawberries when crushed in cream, I think you would do better to fetch your spoon right now and put the country cream over your berries, and a little powdered sugar—only a frost, not a snowstorm—and eat them right now, whole.
Next in the sliding calendar of summer come blueberries. For me, they are a big step down. There are people, though, who swear by them.
I find them hard to pick, first of all. They are another on-all-fours berry. But they choose to make you go over very rough terrain on all your fours. You may fall down a woodchuck hole or bark your shin on a knife of granite.
Then, they fill up too slowly. You may steep in the sun until you are almost at a boil, and get no more than two cupfuls. Blueberries are so small that they do not get ahead at all. And usually there are underdone ones or leaves you have to winnow out in each handful. They make slow going. And that is back-breaking.
It is kind of fun, though. So many pleasant things happen to you on the way. You may scare a partridge up into a small peal of feathery thunder. An inchworm gets on your knee, comes to the open air, and waves his head around. A freckle-lily suddenly appears right under your nose. A hummingbird may come to a wild lily-of-the-valley. Or maybe you sit up all at once on your knees, and there is a red fox staring you in the face, as surprised as you are, with diamonds in his eyes and his fan-tail curving. And he melts away without a sound. Or it may happen that a mother deer will come down your hill, with a fawn on incredible pipe-stems for legs beside her, and the two will be startled and turn to slender bronze, look at you for a long minute, and then leap like two arrows, and be gone into thin air.
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!