Now's the time to go wild for raspberries
Believe it or not, fruit not a berry, but a drupe
When I was a child at summer camp in northern Wisconsin, I made the astonishing discovery that there were plants throughout the forests with fruit on them.
Even though my family was keen on buying from local farmers, you had to drive to the farm, and you had to pay someone for the fruit (which was, by the way, already picked -- not much charm in that for a child).
But there I was, surrounded by fruit just waiting to be plucked from a gracefully arching branch. I could eat it any time I wanted -- and it was free. This made me almost giddy with delight. While there were a few incredibly sweet wild blueberries, the most abundant fruit was raspberries.
Raspberries might not be what you think. Of course, the appearance of the word "berry" in the name might seem like justification for believing that these are, in fact, berries, but they're not.
They're drupes -- stone fruits, like cherries, peaches, and plums. Or, to be more precise, little drupelets, because each tiny globe in the cluster that comprises a single "berry" is a separate fruit with a tiny little stone in the center. Like all the other stone fruits, raspberries are members of the rose family.
Though many plants were under cultivation before written records were even imagined, raspberries, though popular in Europe since prehistoric times, were not domesticated until quite recently. They appear to have not come under cultivation in Europe until the 1600s.
However, since most things have historically come under cultivation because they needed improving, rather than because people liked the extra work, this neglect in domesticating raspberries is testimony to the fact that this fruit is just dandy in the wild.
North America has three important species of raspberry, plus a few minor ones; Europe has one species of raspberry (though many cultivated varieties of that one species), and eastern Asia has more than 200 known species. So, while scholars are hesitant to really nail down a precise location for the origin of raspberries, the general consensus is that eastern Asia seems like a pretty likely spot.
Despite the fact that North America has more species of raspberry than Europe, colonial Americans preferred imported European raspberries until the time of the Civil War.
Even today, though we no longer import our raspberries from Europe, among raspberries under cultivation in the United States, European raspberry varieties outnumber American varieties.
The relative importance of the raspberry in Great Britain can be illustrated by looking at the amount of land given over to growing it. In Great Britain, 10,000 acres of red raspberries are cultivated.
In the United States, which is about 40 times larger than Great Britain, about 11,000 acres of red raspberries are cultivated. It should be no surprise, then, that raspberries feature prominently in this classic English dessert.
This is a fabulous summer dessert -- and beautiful, as it's a stunning, bright pink. It's also much easier than you might guess from the number of notes following the recipe. It's just that this dish has so many possible permutations. Enjoy.
Free-lance food, history and travel writer Cynthia Clampitt is a contributor to the Chicago-based Web site, Hungrymag.com, where this article first appeared.