Lingonberry Love

A favorite of the North, lingonberries (Vaccinium Vitis-idaea) are Alaska’s version of the Thanksgiving cranberry (Vaccinium Oxycoccus), which is best known for lending itself to the formulation of those horrid cans of gelatinous muck that scar the mind of many a socio-economically challenged child....or those with lazy moms.  Growing up with access to the woods, I quickly learned that the most beautiful qualities of any berry are never to be found in a can...but, let’s be fair... I feel that way about just about every food on Earth.

Now, I get that one does not have to hail from the great State of Alaska to be familiar with Our Mother’s annual berry phenomenon.  The North-Eastern US and Canada boast one heck of a crop of those Vaccinium Oxycoccus strains, and one of my favorite reasons to visit Oregon as a child was to enjoy a good portion of their most abundant members of the bramble family, their lovely blackberries.  

I will just admit now that as an Alaskan, I am blessed with a great diversity and quality of wild berries to choose from, and since I was small, it has been an annual tradition to crawl around on the tundra (or in some cases the jungle) on all-fours collecting all we could carry.  

Most berries of which people are familiar, such as the blueberry, currant, and high-bush varieties of cranberry, are also of the genus Vaccinium.  Raspberries, while a wildly popular berry, belong to that aforementioned bramble family along with blackberries, marionberries, black raspberries, golden raspberries, thimbleberries, salmonberries, and I am sure I am missing a few hybridized versions.  In all this berry-mania, the lingonberry is clearly just not spoken of much, despite being the dominant berry shrub in much of interior Alaska.

Specifically in regards to lingonberries, Wikipedia (which is only a credible source for SOME types of information....specifically nothing politically charged) states:

"The berries collected in the wilder are a popular fruit in northern, central and eastern Europe, notably in Nordic countries, the Baltic states, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine."

You can read the whole citation here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccinium_vitis-idaea

So, with the exception of a recently realized industry for them in the Pacific Northwest, specifically in Oregon, this whole lingonberry thing seems to be a very European practice.  Those of you with Scandinavian heritage might not have realized that the cranberries (mostly of the Oxycoccus subtype) in all those old holiday recipes originated with lingonberries prior to your ancestors move to North America.  Well, I guess you could call Alaska the Scandinavia of North America then, eh?  (A shout out to our Lingonberry-loving neighbors...)

My favorite way to pick them is prior to the frost so that my fingers do not get frozen nor stained.  The berries, in my opinion, are best munched upon when still kind of tart and pulpy…as opposed to the squishy, feety option that dominates the frozen woods of the late fall.  The nice thing is that the lingonberries will wait the longest for you to get out there, so you can spend time on more cold-sensitive berries until later in the fall.  

Lingonberries love a reasonably sparse, moist, spruce-dominated forest with a scattering of birch trees.  When you notice a mossy type of forest floor, you are on the right track.  Look for waxy oval leaves on little vines about 4 – 9 inches tall with red berries in bunches of 3 to 6 berries to a bunch.  Each berry has an X where the flower fell off.  Sometimes the berries get so dark a burgundy (usually with a lot of sun) that they are almost black.  I have noted that they tend to like features in the woods that direct more water and let more sun reach them, like knolls, path sides, and overhangs.

Something to note when picking lingonberries is their similarity in description to that of the Bearberry (Arctostaphylos Urva Ursi).   They also have waxy leaves and red berries and grow in thick mats…often near lingonberry bushes!  The key to recognition of this non-poisonous, but none-the-less undesirable (unless you wish to use it as a medicinal herb...but, that’s another blog post) imposter, is noting the way that they creep together in thick, distinctly flatter mats, have a much lighter green color and teardrop shape to the leaves, and how the lighter red or pink berries appear singular instead of in bunches.  Once you make the connection visually, you will be able to spot them from a distance.

Recently, I was privileged to join friends up North at a mining camp as the official transport of a crew member.  As Alaska is a HUGE state, this meant I did a whole lot of driving.  On a drive up where I was alone, I stopped a few places along the highway in the interior.  Once you get an understanding of the terrain types in Alaska it becomes pretty easy to spot key locations prone to berries.  I found a few places with my keen berry sniffer that I was able to fill 4-quart containers with berries the size of marbles in less than an hour.  Needless to say, I finally reached camp late into the night…damp, dirty, twigs and fallen leaves stuck in my pony tail…looking much like a tornado victim.  But I had LOTS of berries!

When I returned home, I immediately realized the folly of berry picking that I conveniently forget every single year; which is that now someone has to stand around and clean all these things!  Fortunately for lingonberries, when harvested prior to that frost date, they are much easier to clean than blueberries.

My method for cleaning them up is pretty straight forward.  I lay a towel (I have actually designated a “berry towel” so that stains are not an issue) out on the largest work surface I have.  I then fill a giant steel baker’s mixing bowl with lukewarm water, dump in enough of the floating little berries until the level is almost at full, or there is no water left, which ever happens first.  

Once soaked, place the berries by the handful on the towel.  As the berries fall off of the hand on to the towel, much of the debris sticks to wet hands, so it is good to rinse the hands after dropping the berries prior to continuing.  You don't want to overload your towel, for fear that they might not fully dry and leave the debris.

As the berries dry off, the remaining debris sticks to the wet towel, making it easy to pick up handfuls, examine to find any remaining particles, and then stick them in the chosen freezing receptacle. For larger batches intended for a batch purpose, I like to vacuum seal into the sizes needed for the intended purpose.  Others I like to keep in resealable freezer bags for quick access to a handful for my fruit shakes or baking.

So, I will leave you with what I found myself thinking while processing a batch of berries once:

Like anything else we touch, we lend it a bit of us; our electrons, hence our energy.  It is evident in how they take some of the heat from our hands, which you can feel as you place them, clean and dried, in the bag.

Nothing is quiet like the flavor that is enhanced with a little bit of our divine heat…our blood, our sweat, and our tears.  Very much like the realization I came to when learning to create masterpiece meals from whole quality ingredients, in this process of cleaning and sorting these little jewels, I further developed the understanding of the tangible benefits we lose when separating ourselves from involvement in our food sources and its preparation.  Think about the lab rat and his daily ration vs the field mouse that can survive and evolve through some of the worst of nature’s wrath.

I often come up with some of the craziest crap when I am doing something mindless, like walking on a treadmill, or processing thousands and thousands of berries.  I guess the mind solves queries when given enough idle time.

Happy carpet-creeping!