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to consciousness they triggered anticipatory nostalgia one of those odors arose from chlorine compounds how long has it been since i was in a swimming pool especially an outdoor pool i used to spend at least eight hours a day at oa pool every summer of my adolescence but one teaching swimming and lifeguarding i was a tower of strength up there on the lifeguard stand the protector of hapless children from the voracious turquoise god of the deep end and mostly unaware of my own glamor who really marked then how evenly the sun distributed pigment across one s supple young pelt painting it a uniform golden hue with none of the troublesome blotchy concentrations that nowadays dredge up unwelcome words like melanoma from one s idle vocabulary blogger s note i began writing this entry immediately after the non events described took place i faltered when i realized that i had racked up 1 700 words without having reached even the first of two triple a guys let alone the fruit i harvested and the jelly i made from it two years later i haven t gotten around to finishing it so i ve decided that i ll just post what i ve got perhaps i ll be motivated to write through to the end of the story someday but trust me what followed was nothing to write home about labels boredom car trouble cell phones communications technology kindness of strangers nostalgia philadelphia summer swimming pools wild cherries posted by urban forager at 9 48 am 3 comments wednesday july 26 2006 are you ready for the country it s only my second post and already i m betraying my nom de silicon the place where i foraged for cobbler last weekend does not in any way qualify as urban in fact the scene there is so quaintly bucolic that the whole county resembles that ideal pastoral landscape the golf course which by the way is an excellent place to look for berries the pastoral impulse the desire to escape briefly from the flow of time is probably why my friends kellie and pete passionate devotees of old time music chose to live there on the fourth of july weekend kellie and pete hosted a multi day old time music event that can i think legitimately be characterized as a hootenanny about a hundred musicians came from locales ranging from new england to texas to indulge some might say to excess their taste for playing folk music mostly of appalachian origin written before 1925 at these events all traces of the sonic present are rigorously excluded rarely does a style as newfangled as bluegrass get a hearing although the occasional dissident will risk it i m not much of an old time musician so while they played antique tunes with names like cluck old hen how many biscuits can you eat this morning and keep my skillet good and greasy all the time i listened and cooked appropriately old timey hillbilly food i smoked two pork shoulders and a beef brisket over hickory for tennessee style vinegary pulled pork barbecue and i chopped up the pepper slaw really more of a relish that traditionally accompanies it i cooked what granny used to call a big mess of greens piquant turnip and mustard and collard to mellow the mixture with a ham hock for a good long time i made buttermilk biscuits each morning i was there and a couple of batches of golden cornbread i was appalled to learn beforehand that my hosts kitchen lacked the seasoned cast iron skillet required for baking cornbread how you gonna call yourselves old timey when you don t even have a skillet to keep good and greasy all the time i demanded so i brought mine with me and my food processor not very old timey but powerful handy and a cooler full of beer and i forgot about all of that stuff when i left which is why i had to go back last weekend on my first trip as i traveled down from the city i had seen flash after enticing flash of scarlet in the underbrush at the roadside and especially in the median of the four lane highway but you can t just pull your car over in a situation like that on a carefully patrolled stretch of road where stopping is prohibited except in case of emergency my understanding of emergency embraces catching sight of a profusion of delicious wild berries with a distressingly short bearing season but i m guessing the state cops construe the word more narrowly i pondered those berries all weekend but i didn t figure out how to get at them until i was back in philadelphia kellie could drive me out to the highway and drop me off after a couple of hours she d come back and retrieve me along with gallons and gallons of the very best forage there is alas the redberry season actually the variety of wild raspberry i pick is properly termed wineberry but i am not using that name for reasons i hope to explain in a later post was pretty much over by the time i was able to make it back by then i had convinced myself that at least some of the flashes of red i had seen in the median were not redberries at all but unripe blackberries that would just about now be coming into season kellie told me that blackberries were bearing on their property so it was not unlikely that those a few miles away would have reached a similar state right but i couldn t tell as i repeated the drive whether there were any ripe blackberries to be had blackberries don t catch the eye the way red ones do and details are easily missed at 60 miles an hour finally the ominous sky convinced me to abandon my plan not that i m above getting a little wet for the sake of berries but i ve heard it said that the middle of a highway without a car is not a good place to be during a thunderstorm so i limited myself to the berries on their property fortified by a breakfast of bacon scrambled eggs enlivened by fresh chives from their garden and toast with redberry jam that i contributed i sleeved myself up and started the hunt while kellie did a little lawyering and pete reviewed his e mail and the latest posts to the old timey forums the sleeving up though unpleasant in the weather typical of berry season offers some protection for the arms you need that because the fact is that blackberry canes unlike redberries just aren t all that genial where the redberry makes me feel as if it has been waiting breathlessly for me to discover it and is eager to share its precious fruit the blackberry s wait seems more in the nature of an ambush the redberry practically jumps into your hand but it takes some tugging to get blackberries off the plant i ve learned not to bother with very small blackberries because i ll often crush the whole fruit in the effort to harvest it the redberry cane is covered by purplish hairs and its delicate little spines are barely more than larger versions of these hairs easily avoided and not very punishing but if the redberry s defense is merely coy no means no for the blackberry its thorns are hard and unyielding and viciously sharp and they are often cunningly concealed in places like the undersides of the leaves once a blackberry thorn has gotten hold of you it does not like to turn you loose either until it has torn a little bit of what it has grabbed better cotton than flesh i figure so i wore a long sleeved shirt of light denim out into a veritable sauna of a day the sort of day when you feel pretty much like a poaching salmon and suspect that you might do better with gills i sweated out about a pint i think and gathered my share of minor injuries while i scouted the perimeter of the property picking blackberries and the occasional remaining redberry i hunkered down low at each thicket as in so many situations the view from beneath is generally more illuminating than that from above i liberally seasoned the acoustic environment with some good old timey salty language and by the time i returned to the air conditioned kitchen i resented the hell out of those hard won blackberries i got about three cups not much of a haul for the effort i thought and it was going to make a pretty shallow cobbler so i decided to extend it with some peaches just down the road was a farm stand operated by anabaptists amish mennonites hutterites i tend to get them confused a shopping foray led to extravagant overpurchasing of beautiful local produce i returned with not only peaches but also apricots cherries tomatoes and sweet corn and when i drove up to the stand i spied a sign that said pig roast today the roasting was being done over wood weaving a smoky aromatic net of the sort most likely to capture me i bought a pound of pork too i made the cobbler dough which is just biscuit dough with a little sugar in it with buttermilk because i think it makes for a tenderer pastry and then i set it in the refrigerator while i prepared the fruit i had decided to make a diminutive cobbler of each fruit and then a large one of the mixture this was an easy choice to make because kellie was following me around washing the dishes as i dirtied them so there wasn t any downside from my perspective i dipped five peaches in boiling water for about 30 seconds each to loosen the skins and then i peeled seeded and chopped them i ate some of the skins because i actually love their fuzziness and sort of regret the peeling after rinsing and draining the blackberries i added sugar cornstarch and a bit of lemon juice to each bowl of fruit that s all ripe summer fruit needs little dressing up it s always a pleasure to pat out biscuit dough on kellie and pete s counter because it s made of pure polished granite the cobblers were still in the oven when kellie and pete left for a gig they had contracted to entertain the patrons of a local dairy farm s ice creamery when the cobblers emerged i loaded them onto a baking sheet covered them with wax paper and hied me to the creamery where the crowd had been reduced by a burst of rain or maybe it had been thin to start with because of the oppressive humidity i can t say for sure kellie and pete were with the fiddlers walt and clare who are their bandmates in the orpheus supertones and a banjo playing lawyer named shel and a fledgling fiddler named jessica they were playing i learned for ice cream chits on previous occasions they had neglected to collect their chits at the end of the day because really they were just playing for the joy of it but i prodded them to take their due after all what complements cobbler better than ice cream and i had a cooler in my car from the creamery we repaired to walt and clare s where old time musicians gather regularly for tunes of a saturday night as i have said i am not much of an old time musician nor can i claim the encyclopedic knowledge of folk tunes that also confers status among this crowd but a woman bearing a fresh cobbler can transgress all sorts of boundaries with impunity clare marinated and walt grilled wonderful shrimp kebabs redolent of the freshly harvested garlic that was stacked like cordwood on their front porch piles and heaps and buckets of it they keep a pair of gas burners out there and walt boiled the corn on one of them so as not to heat up the house when we broke into the cobbler eyes rolled into the back of heads and little moans issued from everyone present we tested all three cobblers and all were good but i must admit that straight blackberry was the best the raw fruit is not quite as tart as the redberry but its flavor is deeper it is ironically in light of the redberry s proper name winier and more complex all right so it s not an amiable fruit but nothing makes a better cobbler and before i left the house walt and clare who are so doctrinaire about the authentic old timiness of their music who have transcribed and catalogued thousands of traditional fiddle tunes played fiddle parts for a tune i wrote let me clarify here i wrote it long after 1925 that s the kind of indulgence a fresh cobbler can earn you as the storm that had brewed all day finally broke against the windows and i heard my song transformed by the magic of their brilliant musicianship i forgave the blackberries i could hardly wait to get back to the city and all the ones that were ripening there full disclosure by the time we ate the cobbler the sun was pretty much gone and i couldn t get a photo so i reproduced the cobblers at home the next day and the second batch is what you see pictured here in the spirit of conscientious bloggery i of course tested each of the cobblers photographed blackberry peach cobbler the dough 1 ¾ cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon baking soda 1 tablespoon sugar 1 teaspoon salt 5 tablespoons butter diced and briefly frozen 1 cup buttermilk yogurt mixed with milk or cream will do the filling 3 cups of blackberries 5 good sized peaches 2 tablespoons lemon juice 2 tablespoons corn starch 1 cup sugar preheat oven to 425 degrees put all the dry ingredients for the dough in a large bowl and whisk them or you can sift them together but this way s easier cut the butter into the flour until the texture of the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal if you want flaky topping the bits of butter should be a little larger like very small peas but for this purpose i think fluffy is better and that requires more butter manipulation i found it necessary to finish the job with my fingers put it in the fridge mix all of the filling ingredients take the flour mixture out of the fridge make a well in the center of it and pour in the buttermilk all at once stir the mixture until it holds together then turn it out onto a surface and pat it out to a thickness of half an inch or so handling it as little as possible pour the fruit mixture into a baking dish tear off pieces of the dough and fit them together jigsaw puzzle style on top brush a little bit of cream or butter on the dough and sprinkle sugar on the surface bake for about half an hour labels berries blackberries cobbler old time music orpheus supertones southern cuisine posted by urban forager at 10 58 pm 9 comments tuesday july 18 2006 the berry grail how i became an urban forager a few springs back i took to riding my bicycle along a riverside path generously provided and maintained by my adopted city it stretched on for miles all the way out to a national historic site in the suburbs and my trips covered progressively more of its length as cherry trees threw off their pink confetti for a callow chartreuse and then a deep sedate green the path traversed woods in places on its shoulders grew underbrush that was cleared in a regular effort to prevent the woods from claiming it back along about july just in time for my birthday speckles of bright ruby the color of my birthstone no less began appearing in this underbrush now there are many cyclists who would never dream of interrupting their training to examine a trailside burst of color these people generally have svelte road bikes handcrafted of some miracle alloy that marries the sturdiness of cast iron with the weight of meringue their expensive high tech cycling apparel swathes bodies so bereft of fat that their poor calves appear flayed with every gristly contour immodestly re...
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