CAN SHE BAKE A BAKEAPPLE PIE?

By CINDA CHAVICH

(Newfoundland) – You see them in the height of summer – berry pickers, stooped in boggy areas along the roadways, plucking wild berries from the low-lying plants dotting the windswept fen.

Like hunting, fishing and general subsistence gathering, heading off to the “berry ground” is an annual tradition in Newfoundland. The rare bakeapple is the real prize, the most cherished among the province’s wild berry bounty. And if you don’t want to break your back in mosquito-infested marshes, there’s always the roadside bakeapple vendors.

We spied our first jars of berries – they’re typically sold by pickers in quart sealers, bobbing in cold water – displayed on the hood of an aging half ton truck near Bay Roberts, just west St. John’s, where bags of cabbages, turnips, carrots and potatoes (the basis of a boiled salt beef jigg’s dinner) are also sold along rural roads.

It’s hard to say what the hard little, electric orange berries have to do with clouds, perhaps it’s the multi-sectioned scalloped shape. According to an old, circa-1958 cookbook, The Treasury of Newfoundland Dishes, one early French explorer asked “what is this berry called?” or “baie qu’appelle?” and the name, phonetically-rendered, stuck. Another early reference, describes them as “bake apples – baygapple – warted red berries ripening late in the summer on low growing plants.”

What’s clear today is that these little berries are dear - $10 for the few cups floating in the jars for sale by the road. But considering that each of the small plants only produces a single golden fruit, it seems a wise bargain.

Like wild partridgeberries (or lingonberries), bakeapples (known in Scandinavian countries as cloudberries) only grow in northern, sub-arctic climates, preferring moist tundra and peat bogs. You might find them in a fresh market in Norway or Sweden, too, but in Canada, it’s a berry unique to pockets of Newfoundland and Labrador, especially the wet, buggy areas.

But Newfoundlanders ignore all of those inconveniences to get their hands on a few buckets of bakeapples. Similar to a small blackberry in shape, the bakeapple is bright amber orange in colour when ripe (defying the usual natural progression by being red when unripe), with an exotic sweet/tart flavour, reminiscent of apricots and honey. The berry’s large seeds are evident in the bakeapple or cloudberry jams and dessert sauces created from the wild fruit, but no one seems to mind.

Newfoundlanders love their bakeapples. You’ll find them in spooned over cheesecake, smeared on bread or baked into tarts. At trendy regional restaurants like Bianca’s or Restaurant 21 in St. John’s, they might appear in a compound butter with the bread basket, or in a creative chutney for pan-roasted cod.

But none are cultivated – all of the cloudberries that find there way into local products and private larders are plucked by hand, some by professional pickers who comb the wild bogs and barrens of Newfoundland, Labrador and northern Quebec during the August picking season.

The Dark Tickle Company bottles bakeapple dessert sauces, bakeapple-infused maple syrup, and even makes bakeapple tea and chocolates. At Rodrigues Winery, Hilary Rodrigues turns cloudberries into wine.

“Last year I bought 2,000 pounds of wild cloudberries from Labrador at $6 a pound,” says Rodrigues who is also experimenting with new technologies to isolate the nutraceutical properties of Newfoundland’s wild berries, and produce functional foods and antioxidant-rich berry powders.

Home cooks are fond of simply cooking up their bakeapples with some sugar, and dumping the seedy sauce over ice cream or desserts, like the creamy cheesecake trotted out after our fish and chips at O’Brien’s restaurant in Bay Bulls. But oddly, they never seem to be baked up with actual apples.

You can always get your bakeapples in St. John’s at Bidgoods, the quintessential Newfoundland supermarket, where the frozen local berries can be found next to the frozen cod tongues and bottled moose nose. Or just do as they do in Newfoundland - pack up a mug-up of bread and tea, and spend a day in the bogs and barrens.

(this Local Bounty column first appeared in the Globe and Mail newspaper)

©Cinda Chavich 2007

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