How to Cook a Moose (27 page)

After that ordeal, the rest of the day was ours. I drove us to the farmhouse, where Brendan's parents made us a beautiful lunch: fresh pesto with linguine (they made gluten-free pasta for me, because they are sweethearts), cantaloupe with prosciutto, and a caprese salad with ripe farm-stand tomatoes. Sitting outside at the table in the grass, looking at the mountains, we drank the bottle of champagne I'd brought to celebrate.

Then, for an hour or so, I fell into a near coma on the couch in the summer barn. Dingo, as worn-out as I was, burrowed into a spot behind the couch and conked out, too. Later, after we woke up, Brendan and his mother and I (and Dingo) went up Foss Mountain to pick blueberries.

By now, having lived up here for a number of years, I'd learned a thing or two about blueberries. The blueberry plant was among the first to appear in the barren wasteland left behind when the gigantic
glacier finally receded, fourteen thousand years ago. This hardy, ground-hugging survivor grew on granite crags, in crevices, near the coast, in the mountains. Wherever there was soil, they grew, and they didn't need much of it. They held on through hot summers, fogs and rains, and long, cold winters. In fact, to produce fruit, they needed the cold winters, and the extremely acidic soil of Maine was likewise hospitable to them. They increased their strength through the years with a system of underground rhizomes, establishing their hold on the northern wilderness. Their tiny bell-shaped flowers matured into fruit; adapting to a range of environments, the blueberry divided into many varieties and tastes from tangy to sweet, known collectively as “the greatest taste on earth.”

The Wabanaki tended the blueberry barrens and gathered the fruit one thousand years ago. They dried the berries and used them in venison jerky, or pemmican, and made little dried cakes out of them, which they stored in birch containers. They made blueberry tea, juice, and syrup, which was used medicinally, for coughs. They used them as dye in basket-making. In all, they considered blueberries magical gifts from the gods in times of starvation, as did the birds and beasts, which have always depended on them for winter survival.

Blueberries are truly a magical gift of nature, unique, versatile, and delicious eaten straight from the plant, as well as high in antibacterial properties and antioxidants. They're rich in vitamins and have healing properties for the eyes and heart. The Natives cared for and cultivated the wild blueberry barrens by burning them periodically to ward off insects and pests and to encourage new bushes to grow. When the Europeans arrived, the Indians taught them their methods of managing the wild blueberries. Colonial cookbooks are full of blueberries in recipes with names like Grunt, Buckle, Fool, and Slump.

There are two basic types of blueberry: highbush and lowbush. Lowbush berries grow wild and are smaller and native only to the
northeast corner, whereas highbush berries are larger, hybridized, commercial, more plentiful, blander, and are cultivated anywhere you can grow them. The general opinion seems to be that lowbush berries are scarcer and harder to get, but they taste much better.

The ubiquity of blueberries in the American diet is a relatively recent phenomenon. Highbush berries didn't even exist until the daughter of a New Jersey cranberry farmer named Elizabeth Coleman White dreamed them up in 1911, wanting to augment the profit of her seasonal cranberries. She worked with a botanist named Frederick V. Colville to develop a larger, easier-to-harvest blueberry with a longer growing season. Now, highbush berries account for about 40 million tons per year of commercially sold blueberries, whereas only 75 million pounds of lowbush berries are harvested and sold out of state, I suspect because the natives choose to keep most of them for themselves . . .

Although they were plentiful and easily preserved, wild blueberries stayed strictly local until the Civil War and the building of the railroads, when they were shipped down to soldiers (Maine sent the highest proportion of men of any Northern state to fight in that war); since then, they've been a mainstay of Maine's economy as well as its culture. The “blueberry rake” is passed down in families, and blueberry picking is a seasonal tradition that brings people back to Maine from wherever they've strayed to join relatives in picking and preserving and enjoying that feeling of sweet warm indigo juice running down your chin on a rare and divine summer day.

We settled into a patch on the flank of the ridge, hot in the sun, and picked handful after handful of the perfectly ripe little lowbush berries, which fell off the stems into our hands. Dingo wallowed happily in a shady leftover rain puddle.

“FUCKER!” Brendan suddenly yelled at the wasp that'd stung his hand, dropping his box of berries and leaping about. As his hand swelled into a monstrous lobster claw, we decided the fun was over. We quickly consolidated all the remaining berries in the basket we'd brought and hiked back to the car, which lurched down the steep, mud-rutted dirt road.

As the sun set, back at home, we all sat outside and drank cold Frascati, watching hundreds of dragonflies trolling through the air for little gnats and midges and, we hoped, some of the wasps who'd taken up residence that summer in every available crevice of the house's exterior.

Then, at the long table with candles lit in the summer barn, we feasted on steamed lobsters and lemon butter, corn on the cob, and asparagus. Dessert was maple-walnut ice cream from a local creamery with, of course, blueberries.

Since I don't make or eat dessert or sweets, I asked my friend Millicent Souris, a baker, chef, and cookbook author who lives in Brooklyn but comes to Maine as often as she can, for her favorite way to cook blueberries. She sent me the following delectable-looking recipe. It goes well with shortbread or any other buttery cookie.

Blueberries with Lemon Curd à la Millicent

I love blueberries. You don't have to peel them, pit them, or cut them. Check them for stems and duds and move on. Blueberry pie is a classic, and also seemingly my nemesis, as it's a juicy mess that rarely has time to set up. My attitude toward fruit is, less is more. I grew up with cornstarch-filled diner pies and syrupy canned fruit. I am fully aware that this past has
influenced my hands-off approach with fruit desserts. I want to taste the sunshine. Please, when it comes to berries, give me summer.

Lemon Curd
(yields 2 cups)

juice and zest of 3 lemons

8 T (1 stick) unsalted butter

1 cup granulated sugar

3 large eggs, lightly beaten

pinch of kosher salt

Fill a medium-size saucepan about one-third full with water, and heat on medium. Use a bowl that will fit on top of the pot, or nestle down a bit, but will not touch the water. Cut the butter into small chunks and toss in the bowl with the sugar. Place the bowl on the pot so the butter starts to melt as you zest the lemons (keep the zest separate to add at the end). Whisk the melting butter and sugar together and add the lemon juice, continuing to whisk until blended.

Lift the bowl. If the water is rapidly boiling—anything over a gentle simmer, really—turn it down and let some of the heat escape to bring the temperature down.

In a separate bowl, continue to beat the eggs together well, until they are fluffy and full of bubbles, and the whites and yolks are integrated. Add the beaten eggs to the other ingredients in the bowl on the stove, whisking everything together. Once this mixture is combined, use a rubber spatula to continuously scrape the bowl around the sides—especially the bottom—so the mixture cooks evenly.

The point of using the double-boiler method is to gently cook your eggs with everything. If the heat is too high, it will scramble the eggs before they become a curd. The mixture will thicken over the next 7 to 10 minutes and become more cohesive and firm along the edges of the bowl. The curd is done when you can lift the
spatula, run your finger through the curd on it, and it's thick and satiny, like pudding.

Add the zest and salt. Mix. Turn into another bowl and cover with cling wrap; otherwise, it will form a weird skin. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

Blueberries

1 pint blueberries, picked through for stems and duds

1/4 cup raw sugar

juice and zest of 1 lemon

pinch of sea salt

a few sprigs of tarragon, mint, or chervil, chopped

1 tsp vanilla, or a scraped vanilla pod

Pick the leaves off the herbs and chop. Bruise the herb stems by crushing them in your hand for a few seconds and then toss with the blueberries; there's a lot of flavor and fragrance in the stems. Toss the blueberries with sugar, salt, and vanilla. Add the lemon juice and zest. Let the fruit mixture sit for at 30 minutes. Serve with the lemon curd.

Mushrooms proved to be slightly trickier than blueberries to find and collect and eat. We started hypothetically.

One fall morning, after a breakfast of toast with scrambled eggs, Brendan, Dingo, and I set out on the “circle walk,” a four- or five-mile loop that's the alternative route to our usual daily walk to the main road. We'd always seen a lot of mushrooms in the summer and fall, so this time, on a lark, we decided to bring a covered straw basket, not unlike the one Red Riding Hood might have carried to her grandmother's house.