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Berries

What are berries? About the ingredient berries. Including 78 recipes with berries, nutrition data, and where to find it.

About

The word “berries” describes not only the fruits that have berry as part of their names, but also cherries, tomatoes, and even the hips of roses, for the definition says that berries are any kind of small, pulpy fruit, no matter what its structure may be.

They are one of nature’s most dramatic proofs that good things do indeed come
in small packages.

In cooking, there are certain fruits we think of as strictly berries.

Their names alone are delightful: barberries, bilberries, blackberries, blueberries, boysenberries, cloudberries, cranberries, currants, elderberries, gooseberries, loganberries, mulberries, raspberries, rowanberries and strawberries conjure visions of a pleasant land under wide skies where nature's jeweled bounty is there for the taking.

Berries grow in a wide variety of climates, but generally speaking they are a northern fruit; some, like the cloudberry of Scandinavia, even require Arctic latitudes.

Though many berries, especially strawberries, are cultivated commercially, berries still have the feeling of the wild about them.

Many wild berries taste incomparably better than their tamed brothers; nothing equals the flavor of the tiny wild strawberries of France, the wild raspberries of Maine, and the lingonberries of the vast silent woods of Norway, Sweden, and Finland.

Berries have been a wilderness food, helping many a lost man to survive. They have provided the necessary vitamins to people living when vitamins had not yet been discovered and named as such, yet were no less necessary to good health.

Berries have given variety and joy to the monotonous diet of colonists, often providing the only fruit. They have inspired poets through the ages; the 16th-century poet Thomas Tusser sings in his “Septembers Husbandrie” as follows:

“The Barberry, Respis (raspberry) and Gooseberry too, look now to be planted
as other things doo; The Gooseberry, Respis and Roses, al three, With Strawberies under them trimly agree."

And Tusser’s admonition: “Set strawberies, wife, l love them
for life" are as valid now as when the words were written.

ln cooking, berries are generally interchangeable in recipes.