Wild Blackberry Crisp For Two
Head to the ditches and roadsides, everybody! Wild blackberry season is upon us.
Last year was not a great year for berries. I spent a spent a humid hour in bright sunlight getting caught on brambles and slitting my fingertips on thorns to gather a meager few handfuls of overripe fruit. When I got home I washed the berries twice. I planned to make a blackberry crisp like I always do, but the moment I added sugar to the gleaming drupes, they began to writhe with teeny bugs. Sometimes wild fruit is a bit too wild. I threw the whole batch out.
You’d think that experience would be enough to put me off wild blackberries forever, but I’m not so easily frightened. It’s sort of like those of us gathered around a heap of corn at last weekend’s market: no one is scared off when they pull away green husks from ears of corn expecting to find beautiful checkerboard kernels, and instead see a big old worm eating a Pac-Man path around the cob. Disgusted? Yes. But scared off? No. Just look for the ones without worms, or with ends that could easily be chopped off and leave the worms out of it. Simple.
This year the first berries are small and taut, but not buggy. Last week I gathered a handful with my mom while we walked the path at a popular park. We noticed them only because of a family stopped at the brambles, picking the fruit themselves. Further inspection down the path turned up more brambles, more fruit, dozens of hard red berries awaiting the continued heat. Virginia has been in a drought, and farmers are suffering. My favorite blueberry farm has all but lost their crop, and are closed indefinitely. The first time in forty years. So far the wild berries are holding on, but they aren’t abundant like some years.
Andrew and I return to the park shortly before dusk. Intense humidity softens every noise and settles wetly on our skin; that underwater-feeling for which Southern summers are famous.
“Couldn’t we stop for more blackberries at the store if we need to supplement?” Andrew asks as we trek through the swampy evening to reach the spot.
We couldn’t, I explain, because wild blackberries are an entirely different thing. They’re tart. And exciting, because we pick them. And they taste like childhood.
But we shouldn’t have worried. The berries remain where I’d seen them the other day: more wilted on behalf of heat indexes soaring toward one hundred, but ripe. We make sure to pick only what we need for our dessert, leaving plenty for the wildlife who are also, probably, a little hungrier than usual in all this drought. Just enough to cover the bottom of the plastic berry pail. A pint or so - no more. Enough for the two of us.
When we return home (purple fingers, pricked fingers) I soak the berries in a bowl of cold water and apple cider vinegar. No bugs. A bit of sugar, a quick crumb topping. Into the oven in a small cake tin. Shower off the sweat and bug spray. Blackberry crisp and an old Disney movie. In the liminal space between sleep and awareness, I am mostly still a child, full of tart-sweet blackberry crisp and Alan Menken songs.
At three A.M., I awake to the sound of rain. Our first in weeks. Drowsily, I nestle into the covers and imagine the parched leaves of the berry bushes - the wild ones, and those of the farmers - lifting cupped hands to the sky in thanks.
This is my favorite time of year, foraging-wise. I scoured the archives of this Substack, sure I’d mentioned blackberry picking before, but it seems like I haven’t? So here’s the low-down on the easiest wild edible to identify:
First off, they’re an excellent urban-foraging entry point because there are no poisonous lookalikes to wild blackberry! The only thing you could possibly confuse it with is a wild raspberry, which is simple another delicious (and in this area rare) edible.
Blackberries tend to grow in disturbed, sunny, almost run-down soil. That’s why you often find them in ditches, dry sunny areas, along railroad tracks, roadways, etc. They seem to prefer areas that other plants abandon. The plant grows in long, sprawling, looping canes covered in sharp thorns, and the leaves are green and serrated. It’s pretty easy to spot blackberry brambles because they tend to take over the area in which they’re growing, and the fruits are so pretty and glossy! Ripe blackberries are, of course, black - leave the red ones to ripen further. Your classic wild blackberry will typically have more “cells” to their fruit and look a bit elongated, while a variant called a “dewberry” is a small, round clump. Additionally, blackberry vines tend to grow upright and then fall over whereas dewberry vines trail closer to the ground. Both taste very similar so for the purpose of finding, gathering, and eating, blackberries and dewberries are interchangeable.
If you don’t already know of a wild blackberry patch in your immediate area, I recommend visiting local parks walking along the wood-line, or checking overgrown, empty lots or brushy places between or behind shopping centers. Of course it may feel a little strange to be gathering berries off bushes in public, but it’s worth it. Pay attention to any markings of private property, steer clear of bushes located directly off a busy road (I can’t imagine that car fumes/smoke/etc. are great to ingest), and get foraging.
When I was little, my dad would cut gallon milk jugs into berry baskets, sometimes hanging them around our necks with a necklace of nylon twine. Then he’d lead us like a troop of bear cubs into the thicket of wild blackberries behind our local Lowe’s. I hated the prickly, stabby brambles but knew blackberry crisp was in our future if we’d just keep on. And I’ve got to tell you, there is nothing as good as wild blackberry crisp with a scoop of vanilla ice cream melting through each spoonful.
I made a quick recipe just for you! Of course you can scale the recipe up to feed more people (and to be honest I never use a recipe myself) but I wanted to create a crisp that serves two for a couple reasons!
If you’re single, you can have leftovers or invite a friend over, if you’re married it’s a perfect one-serving wonder.
I find that picking viciously-thorny wild berries in the height of a heatwave is easier said than done, and often your patience is going to run out after gathering about a pint.
Naturally, you can use any berry in this recipe, even store-bought blackberries. I may be a purist about using wild blackberries in mine, but that’s the nostalgia talking. I hope that you enjoy this recipe, and share it with someone who is making your summer one for the books. Cheers!
Wild Blackberry Crisp For Two
1 pint (2 cups) wild blackberries, washed well
2 Tbs. cane sugar
1/2 tsp. cornstarch
for the crumble
1/4 cup brown sugar (or coconut sugar)
1/4 cup unbleached all purpose flour
1/4 cup rolled oats
1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
a pinch of salt
3 Tbs. cold butter
Heat oven to 350 F. Mix together berries with cane sugar and corn starch. Pour into a small baking dish or cake tin.
In a small bowl mix together the dry ingredients for the crumble. I like to break the butter into small chunks and work it into a uniform crumble with my fingers, but you can use a pastry cutter or a food processor for this.
Scatter crumble topping over the berries and set in the oven. Bake for approx. 30 minutes or until topping is golden and fragrant and the berries and bubbling up between.
Allow to cool for 10 minutes, then serve warm, topped with vanilla ice cream if desired.