Happy Poetry Friday!
Thank you to Linda for hosting this week’s roundup! Please visit her at Teacher Dance to check out her lovely summer look-back poem as well as all the other Poetry Friday posts.
Have you ever tasted a food and transported to another time and place? Just the thought of eating a candy apple takes me back to strolling around the county fair with sticky hands and red cheeks.
Yesterday, I was in a small market in Massachusetts with my son, and we came across baskets of wild black raspberries. Of course, I had to buy some. There were also boxes of Concord grapes. We needed some of those too.
As we were walking out of the store a couple berries fell on the ground. Not wanting to waste a memory, I scooped them up, dusted them off, and popped them into my mouth. My son and husband laughed when I said, “Tastes like being a kid.”
Growing up in Western NY State, I spent my summers with my cousin. An unruly, black raspberry patch sprawled behind my house. We hid in that berry patch for hours eating sun-warmed berries, getting scratched by inch-long prickers, and picking fruit for my older sister to bake us a pie.
If you’ve ever eaten wild black raspberries, you know that the seeds are disproportionally large and hard compared to blackberries, and the flavor is a bit … muskier? Black raspberry pies are dry and more seed than fruit ... but, I can’t get enough. Black raspberries are part of my soul.
The same goes for Concord grapes. We grew up in the NYS Finger Lake Region – wine country. Wine is fine, but … the grapes are where the magic lives. There is a technique to eating Concord grapes – if want a pleasant experience. I am going to share this technique with you, in confidence.
You pick a grape and squeeze it into your mouth until the pulp and juice empty from its skin. You let the clear, sweet juice trickle across your tongue and the pulp slide down your throat. Do not chew! If you bite down, very sour juice from inside the pulp will escape, and you will have to contend with two large, crunchy seeds.
What happens next is the subject of much controversy: eat or toss the skin? I toss ‘em, but my cousin always swore by eating the skins. They aren’t bad, just not as delicious as the sublime juice and slippery pulp. Nowadays, I bake the skins into quick bread where they masquerade as blueberries.
Concords
Sunbaked
grapes
plucked
and sucked
release
the
flavor
of
childhood.
© Tracey Kiff-Judson
If you can find Concord grapes – here is a recipe to try with the skins. It is rather dense, but quite tasty!
Hold it to my nose and I'm a child
who twisted a black raspberry from a bush
which I roll gently in my palm
and deposit in a pail
where I can still smell it and its kin
as I move farther down the hilly path,
fighting the urge to grab the brambles
to steady myself
as pebbles shift under my feet,
already aware that harvesting treasure
means hazarding tumbles and thorns.