A glossy purple clot, Tom Waits, brown betty crumble and two excellent drinks
Abundance: Monday 16 September
No matter how many years I take to the hedgerows, my heart overrules what my head knows: blackberries are a late summer fruit. Seamus Heaney1 knew. ‘Summer’s blood’ is in them.
And yet it makes no sense: blackberries - complex and indirect - taste of autumn, with none of strawberries’ easy summer brightness. Strawberries are There She Goes, an easy to love open book; blackberries are all The Heart of Saturday Night and feel like they have something left to tell you.
In the days when an entire Saturday was given over to the FA Cup Final, blackberrying caused families - kids grumpy at being torn from the telly, parents bickering after a fruitless search for Tupperware lids to match their tubs - to stream from homes2 as if called by an invisible church bell. Out to verges, overgrown hedges, and - in our case - the semi-choked path of the old railway line, in search of free fruit3. What Beeching discarded, nature reclaimed.
For every blackberry we popped purple-fingered into a tub, we ate two. It was not without jeopardy: Heaney’s weren’t the only hands ‘peppered with thorn pricks’, and there was last of the jasper Luftwaffe and the seed-heavy nettles to contend with. As delicious as those blackberries straight from the bush were, Mum’s blackberry and apple pie - to see us through the weekend before going back to school - was the real prize. These decades later, I can still taste it.
I do pick a few blackberries in August, hoping for ‘heavy rain and sun for a full week’, but I don’t enjoy it the same as when I have a cold nose4, though this means playing stick or twist with early autumn sun ripening those that are ‘hard as a knot’ in mid August.
Out on this morning’s footpaths winding up towards the woods, amongst the honeysuckle and beech, there are still plenty of blackberries, if marble-small and tight. I grow some in the garden too, and this sunny week has seen a late flush. While the peak of homegrown blackberries may come earlier, larger, juicier, sweeter and more heavily than their wild relatives, I certainly wouldn’t choose them over the complexity and the gentle palaver of foraging.
Folklore has it that Archangel Michael defeated Satan in battle, banishing him from heaven to hell, arse-first into a blackberry bush, causing him to spit on the bush and curse its fruit - hence you oughtn’t to eat blackberries after Old Michaelmas Day (10 October), but good luck finding some so late, or - if you do - free of mould.
Below, more words and recipes for Apple and blackberry brown betty crumble, Blackberry whisky and Honeyed blackberry vinegar