on loving brambles
make the ice cream, do it now
From late July each year, my partner starts becoming alert to the sight of a ripening bramble. By the end of August our freezer is packed to the gills with them. D cannot take a walk in the end of summer without taking a Tupperware and coming home purple-fingered and delighted. I greatly benefit from all of this.
You might not think of Glasgow as a forager’s paradise, but you’d be surprised. There are a few seasonal happenings that shape the foraging year of even the most hardened bougie Southsider. The first is the wild garlic moment, in March and April, where bouquets of this wildly aromatic leaf burst up near rivers and streams and you take home bags full of the stuff, noticing that the sweetness of the young leaves in March gives way to a bitterness as it starts to turn in late April, processing it into pesto as soon as you get through the door. The second, for me, is when the vegan bakery starts to make semlor, the Swedish lenten buns which are spiced with cardamom, lined with almond paste and filled with a whipped cream (dragging myself up to walk twenty minutes in the Glasgow April rain is foraging). The third is bramble season, when you load up the freezer with the fresh berries and stewed fruit and crumbles that will take the edge off the shortening days, warming you from the inside as you cover yourself in blankets in the coming autumn. Who could turn down free produce? Who doesn’t love the promise of a warm belly in the winter days?
Brambles (or blackberries, for those of you outwith Scotland) have become a strange totem of my time living north of the border. When I did my first writing residency, at Cove Park almost exactly seven years ago, the brambles were out in full force on the Loch Long hills and I foraged some to make a crumble for my fellow residents. Long walks in the countryside at the right time of year are punctuated by stops to grab smeary purple handfuls of them. When we moved to Glasgow, finding bramble bushes beneath the train bridge felt like the first secret we’d discovered in the place we now called home. When I think of brambles now, I think of this country.
Last week we were invited to dinner at a friend’s place and I wanted to take a dessert. My go-to with brambles is always a blackberry and apple crumble, because for me crumble is the ur-food, the first thing I learned to make, the most comforting dish that there is. Something sparked a different idea this time though, and I landed on this recipe. I don’t wish to alarm anyone, but I think this recipe makes possibly the best ice cream I have ever, ever eaten.
It’s best not to fuck about with perfection, but being me, I did: I switched the milk out for more double cream (for the delicious fat), I added a little Chambord to the ripple sauce (for the flavour) and a little vodka to the ice cream base, to stop it overfreezing. This is a good trick especially if you don’t have an ice cream maker; stir 2-3 tablespoons of gin/vodka/whisky into your ice cream, choosing whichever alcohol will go with your main flavours. Spirits over 40 percent alcohol will never freeze in a household freezer, as you’ll know if you’ve ever put gin in there because you’ve run out of ice and can’t stand a tepid G&T. By adding the alcohol, you will stop large ice crystals from forming, which will stop your ice cream becoming an unscoopable block. An ice cream maker achieves the same by moving the mixture around as it freezes from the outside, forcing a more even and creamy freeze. If you have an ice cream maker AND you add a little booze, you’re on easy street. If you don’t, be generous with the splash of booze, and bring it out of the freezer every half hour or so to stir it aggressively, until about four hours have passed. Remember to give it a little softening time before you serve it.
I have made this ice cream twice this week, and served it excitedly to three different sets of people. I’ve snuck teaspoons of it before bed, bathed in the small light of my freezer, letting the cats lick a little melted morsel off my fingers. I’ve taken it to a pal’s house to eat before watching an atrocious film (Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2). If we’re being strict, it’s not a traditional ice cream; it lacks the eggs that would make the custard which would form the base. But really, why would you complicate the process when the simple method results in something so good? Make this, and share it, and let it inspire you to a whole fleet of bramble experiments: a crème de mûre, made with a bottle of red wine and some vodka; a bramble (the drink), which is basically a gin sour with fresh blackberries thrown in; a bramble and goat’s cheese salad, with spinach as the green bed. Take those fat little fruits and make them shine.
The bramble is the subject of much folklore in the UK. In the Isle of Man, they say you should leave the first crop of brambles for the fairies, lest the rest of the season’s fruit end up full of grubs. In Dorset, they believed that the ripening brambles coincided with pets, livestock and babies becoming sick, and that a child with whooping cough should be taken through an arch of blackberries seven times to cure them. Most enduring, though, is the idea that you should not eat brambles after October 11th, old Michaelmas Day, because on this day the devil was thrown out of heaven, and landed on a bramble bush, and cursed those who ate them after that date to become ill. Whether we believe in Lucifer, or in the storytelling skills of elders who knew that blackberries start to sour at the end of September, it’s a good reminder of the power of seasonality; of the particular pleasure of taking something from the bushes right by your door, and turning it into a bowl, or a glass, of sheer indulgence to share.