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The Berries, the Buckle
Alright, enough philosophical navel gazing, on to something tangible and delicious. I am speaking, of course, of blackberries. Quarts and quarts of them: the quarts and quarts Jamie and I picked. Saturday night we stayed at a cousin's house whose back woods are filled with ripe blackberries. She wasn't home, which worked out as it would have felt rude to spend so much time in the woods picking berries otherwise. As it was, the chief obstacle in our endeavor were the mosquitos. I blame the wet spring for inspiring the birth of so many blood-thirsty minions, each one hungry and aggressive. Jamie and I loaded up on insect repellent twice--once before setting out for the woods, and then again when we got there and were swarmed anyway--and I think all it did was make them craftier. Several of them tried to go after my eyes, presumably as one of the few places I hadn't doused in repellent. Nor did stepping back into the sun seem to thin their ranks much. In the end Jamie and I adopted a method of moving quickly from bush to bush, trying to stay a foot or two ahead of the mosquitos, and periodically sweeping our hands over our heads to clear them away. I also every so often threw something over my shoulder and declared, "I rebuke thee, Satans." No word as to whether it gave me any great advantage.

This led me to think a bit about the power of sugar: because we knew those berries to be sweet and delicious, we were willing to stand in swarms of blood-sucking insects, thrusting our arms into bushes covered with thorns, scaring up snakes as we went, all for a little dark dollop of sugar ripening into fruit no bigger than a thumbnail. If you wonder why diets fail, look no further than that. This particular cousin also keeps bees (just imagine honey made from the pollen of blackberry bushes, then imagine I used both to make a blackberry jam, and envy me my breakfast this morning). It's a similar story there: the hard work of wringing honey out of a wax comb, the inevitability of getting stung to retrieve it. Such is sugar's hold on us. There is some wiring in the human brain that ignores great discomfort to get to it. What is a warning from a nutritionist compared to that?

Maybe the best moment in our berry picking came at the end. We had taken a little four wheeler to get out to the woods. When I had filled my last container and could take the mosquitos no longer, I yelled out, "Let's blow this blood-letting!" Jamie fired up the four wheeler and came roaring up to where I was. I threw my berries on back, climbed on behind him, and we took off down the trail out the woods. The sun was just starting to set, though there was a sudden rush of warmth when we cleared the canopy, and I nuzzled my cheek against Jamie's back. Neither of us spoke. There was something almost cinematic about it, us escaping the woods with our plunder just before dark settled in and nothing would be left to hold the mosquitos back. I felt intensely lucky in the moment and more than a little happy just to be there.

Now, of course, the bounty is home and I have been hard at work converting it into a more durable state. Yesterday I put up five jars of jam and baked a blackberry cake. We also ate the berries raw with warm popovers and dollops of whip cream. Today I have a second cake in the works and whatever is left will get frozen for smoothies. It was a little bit of hell on earth to get these berries, but oh the heaven of eating them now! It reminds me of a poem by Stephanie Bolster that says to eat a blackberry is to kiss the whole world at once. True, true. So far the best use of the blackberries has to be Jamie's idea to bake them into a buckle. Buckles are very old fashioned cakes, closely related to muffins or shortbreads, with a light crumb and an even lighter sweetness. Normally this is a recipe for blueberries, but I have to say I like the blackberry version even better. The seediness of the berries gives the cake a more interesting mouthfeel. I offer you the recipe now as something light and easy for whatever fruits are ripening in your neck of the woods.

Berry Buckle

Cake:
2 C. flour
3/4 C. sugar
2 1/2 t. baking powder
3/4 t. salt
1/4 C. shortening*
3/4 C. milk
1 egg

Topping;
1/2 C. sugar
1/3 C. flour
1/2 t. cinnamon
1/4 C. butter

Preheat oven to 375. Combine all cake ingredients and beat vigorously for 30 seconds. Fold in 2 cups of your choice of berry (blueberry, blackberry, it strikes me raspberry and cherry might also work nicely, or even diced plum....) Carefully spread in a greased 9x9 pan. Then combine all topping ingredients and beat until it resembles coarse meal. Sprinkle over the cake batter. Bake 45-50 mins or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

*If you, like me, have issues the hydrogenated nature of shortening, I have found that mayonnaise (believe it or not) makes a good substitution for quantities up to 1/3 a cup. It makes sense as shortening is really a fat suspension with a melting point similar to mayo (which, after all, is itself fat in suspension). I've been using a pure, olive oil based mayo in my baking and in this cake in particular I have been very pleased. My guess is lard would also work well, though you have to be careful in buying lard to make sure it hasn't undergone similar dubious treatments as shortening to make it shelf stable. Just a thought....