How to Make Huckleberry Muffins

Filed under: Musings — November 24, 2007 @ 7:24 pm

First, pick the huckleberries.

Huckleberries have not been successfully tamed and are not grown commercially. You can’t pop into Safeway and pick up a can of Wyman’s huckleberries. So, the first step in making muffins is to find a patch of wild huckleberries.

Some years ago my friend Carol introduced me to huckleberry picking. Right away I learned that people keep the location of their favorite berry patch to themselves. Since there aren’t many places in the Bay Area where huckleberries grow, it’s part of the ethos of picking to be secretive. Carol was being unusually big-hearted. I’m not going to reveal where I get my supply, except that it involves walking at least six miles through some of Earth’s prettiest woods.

This year I go a bit late, the first week in September. The weekday morning is bright and cool, fog just lifting away though still twining around the treetops. The grassy verge, the crowds of ferns, and the elderberry bushes in their end-of-season shabbiness gleam with moisture. The air smells fresh and clean, with a soft undertone of fir and green growing things.

As I set out, I recall how Robert Hass ended his poem “Meditation at Lagunitas” with

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

I feel compelled to chant “huckleberry, huckleberry, huckleberry” when I too want to evoke the numinous. The sound is comforting and full of promise.

Not far from the trailhead, huckleberry bushes congregate under the Douglas firs and bay trees, but most years this patch yields few berries. I need to hike farther and a little higher to get a decent crop. The forest is lush with sword ferns and bracken, elderberries, hazelnuts, grape vines, and Hass’s blackberries. Shafts of filtered sunlight angle across the path, still wet in places from the lingering mist. At the end of summer not many flowers remain—mostly the yellows like sticky monkey flower, dandelion, and bird’s-foot trefoil—so I am delighted to see a modest patch of self-heal. I love its botanical name, Prunella vulgaris, and find nothing vulgar about it. With dark green hairy foliage and short dense spikes of purple flowers, it’s only ankle high. Here and there dangle a few late blossoms of Watsonia, a South African bulb probably introduced a century ago by ranchers’ wives and now freely multiplying in large drifts. The orange flowers glow against the welter of forest greens. Blackberry leaves are turning their earthy autumnal red and some of the poison oak wears its don’t-touch-me scarlet.

I see more and more huckleberry bushes as I hike, but no berries yet. Vaccinium ovatum is our native species. Its leaves are dark green, about an inch long and finely serrated. They are tough and leathery, with a shine that assembles into pools of light in the dim woods. Some connoisseurs claim our berries are not as tasty as those of the inland mountains. I can’t confirm that, but I do know that ours are far more complex in the mouth than the related blueberry of the east. Today I hope to collect enough to make a batch of muffins this evening and to freeze some for the winter.

Few hikers are out this early. I hear scrub jays scolding, snatches of wind high up in the branches, and my own rhythmic footsteps. For several minutes the trail looks completely unfamiliar—in a sudden, odd little altered state—even though I have tramaped along here for twenty-five years. After a few disoriented seconds, I like the feeling of not knowing where I am. Then I recognize the uphill that signals the beginning of the best picking.

Not all huckleberry bushes bear fruit every year. Many young plants crowd up to the trail’s edge, but only the older, six-foot-tall bushes will have berries. It seems as if the scraggliest have the most and biggest fruit. Huckleberries are less than a fourth of an inch long, smaller than the petite peas you find in the frozen food section of the supermarket. Ripe huckleberries are black; the best look like shiny pearls. They hang from the leafy branches in twos, threes, and fours. Clumps of berries may contain ripe black specimens, nearly ripe red ones resembling tiny apples, and small green nubbins. I want the black ones.

When I began my picking career, my collecting bag would come home full of leaves, twigs, lichens, spider webs, and . . . spiders. Cleaning my haul was a chore. Since then I have learned to pick more delicately. I ease the berries gently off their branch—when they are ripe they come unhitched at the slightest touch—and twist them a little in my fingers to get rid of the stems. I hold my gallon-size plastic bag and the branch in one hand and use my other hand to scoot the fruit into the bag. My hiking stick comes in handy for pulling down the highest branches, teasers sometimes ornamented with rows of the fattest black beads. Occasionally choice berries flip off into the tangle of grasses and vines, and I must let them go or come home dirty and torn.

This year the crop is sparse. It might be that the bushes are picked out since I have come late, but even the highest branches are bare, so I think it’s a lean year. How fortunate that huckleberries are rather insipid until they’re cooked—I’m not tempted to nibble away at my meager harvest as I work. I decide to go a mile farther to a less frequently traveled trail. This new area is hushed and still dripping with fog, and I find a few laden bushes. After an hour, I estimate my bag holds only about two cups worth, but that will be enough.

Walking back to the car, I notice the fog has disappeared. The day is deliciously warm. With wild bounty tucked away in my pack and nowhere special to be, I wish the trail could go on forever.

At home the drudgery begins. The berries must be cleaned. Did I mention they are smaller than the smallest peas? Even though I am a better picker nowadays, the pile in the colander includes dead fir needles, unripe fruit, and pieces of dark stuff I can’t identify and don’t want to eat. Many berries still have their little green stems attached and these have to be taken off one by one. I spend about forty-five minutes at this task and finally rinse my beautiful black pearls in clear water. In the end, I have just under two cups.

If you choose to make such an expedition and come home with a decent crop of huckleberries, I suggest that you add half a cup of clean fruit to your favorite muffin batter or to buttermilk biscuits. I’ll give you my recipe for The Slump, an old recipe that is not easy to come by.

The Slump

2 cups huckleberries

2/3 stick of butter

1 cup sugar

1 cup flour

1 cup milk

1½ teaspoons baking powder

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Melt the butter in an 8×8x2-inch cake pan. Combine the sugar, flour, milk, and baking powder in a bowl and whisk to make a smooth batter. Pour the batter over the melted butter, but don’t stir them together. Then pour the huckleberries, including juice, over that. Again, do not stir. It looks like a mess, but bake it anyway for about 45 minutes or until the top is golden. Test with a toothpick; it should come out clean. Yummy with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream. Or on its own.

This is the best part: I bite into the muffin or slice of slump and I am back there in the near silence of the woods. I smell the firs. I hear the tumble of berries off lichened branches—pa-pa-pa-pa—as they fall safely into my bag. A warm muffin and a slather of butter. Ah, the comfort and the joy of promises kept.

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Jane Merryman

How to Make Huckleberry Muffins

The Slump

No Comments