Potential in wild fruits for diversions and industry

Press, 4 February 1989, Page 22

Potential in wild fruits for diversions and industry

I’ve been travelling in the countryside quite a lot in the last week or two, and I couldn’t but be struck by the prolific crop of wild fruits set this year — apples and knobbly little pears on roadside seedling trees, hawthorn berries, cotoneaster, rowan berries, late wild plums, elderberries, rosehips, crabapples. All that fruit, to waste! Well, not quite to waste — it’s a major source of food for birds and some small animals. But it seems unfortunate that more of it can’t be picked and used for people. This is done in Europe, where such fruits as wild plums are the basis of commodities such as liquors and preserves; and in some tropical countries wild and wayside fruits are economically important. And there is precedent for it in New Zealand: a cottage wine industry in South Canterbury, based on elderberries. Could this be a template for other developments? Well, there isn’t much you can do with cotoneaster berries, or hawthorn berries, but some of the others have potential: rosehips and barberries particularly. Given the paucity of indigenous fruits, these exotic intruders might well be the basis of a new cottage industry, churning out select jams, preserves and wines for the. next generation of sensationseeking city slickers. Be that as it may or may not, I hand out the idea along with a selection — absolutely free — of recipes to which they may be put. First, the barberry. The European barberry was to New Zealayi in

the mid-nineteenth century as a hedge plant, but lost popularity when it was discovered to be a host species on which a wheat rust overwinters. So it never became common, except locally, in areas where it thrived — such as'the Dunedin region. European barberry, (known to botanists as Berberis vulgaris) was soon replaced in hedgerows by South American and Himalayan species, both of which, somewhat ironically, were to become noxious weeds. Darwin’s barberry. (Berberis darwinii) was, as it happens, primarily grown as an ornamental flowering shrub, for which purpose it is still cultivated 1 in some parts of the country; it is more a pest of the North Island than of the South, and though it is locally a pest, especially, in gullies, it does not spread into managed pasture in Canterbury. I know of one group of plants, on the roadside at Glenroy, in Central Canterbury, which has shared its stretch of roadside for at least 15 years, maybe twice that, with native kohUhu shrubs, and has never spread; in jate

winter its bright yellow flowers are a notable feature. The common barberry which often sprouts in city gardens near bird tables is Berberis glaucocarpa, a Himalayan species which closely resembles the European barberry. It is thought that this was actually the species identified in most early New Zealand records of wild barberries as B. vulgaris. The European barberry is, however, locally common in parts of inland Canterbury and Otago; it is most easily distinguished from the other at the fruiting stage — the Himalayan species has very dark fruit covered with glaucous bloom, whereas the European barberry has red fruit. Several other barberries, Asiatic and South American, are recorded as naturalised, having escaped from gardens. Seeds of all the species are now, I understand, prohibited imports. Birds, particularly thrushes and blackbirds, spread barberry seeds around the countryside, just as they spread seeds of other palatable (to them) fruits including nightshades, sweetbriar, cherries and blackberries. The people who introduced these European pests have a lot to answer for! Just as it takes a minimum of five and twenty blackbirds to make one small pie, it takes lots bf barberries to make a pot of preserve. And they aren’t easy picking all those thorns make them worse than gooseberries. Still, if you do manage to struggle back to the kitchen with’ your punctured arms laden wit>

barberries, there are things to make with them: jelly, syrup, candy, pickles. Here are some recipes from a Victorian homemaking manual, “Cassell’s Household Guide.” Barberry jelly. — Make three pounds of sugar into a strong syrup, and boil the same quantity of barberries in it until scum ceases to rise. Then strain the jelly through a sieve, boil it again, and pour it into pots. Barberry syrup. — Boil some pickled barberries until they aire reduced to a pulp. Strain the clear juice, and boil into syrup, with at least an equal weight of loaf-sugar. Pickled barberries. — Boil some salt in white-wine vinegar until the pickle is sufficiently dense to bear an egg placed in it, without allowing it to fall to the bottom of the vessel. When the vinegar has boiled for half an hour, strain it into an earthenware jar. As soon as the liquid is cold, put into it the barberries, selecting those that are most red, that the pickle may have a better colour. Add half a pound of moist sugar and more vinegar, if required, and carefully secure the mouth of the jar. Only an incurable optimist would suggest that barberries could be the next big export crop — but in these days of economic pressure on established crops it’s worth looking at anything “new.” Barberry wine may be an acquired taste, but so is olive oil. And if you can make* a cottage industry out of elderberries you should be able to make one out of almost anything. Sweetbriar, another of our

thorny weeds, can supply the raw material for wine, jam or jelly. Its fruit, called “hips” or sometimes “heps,” are rich in vitamin C — good for giving a boost to babies, or wine (in my winemaking days I learned that a small bottle of rosehip syrup enhances the flavour of any fruit wine). Sweetbriar is one of several wild roses naturalised in New Zealand; the others include the dog rose, which prompted an bld rhyme that summarises some botanical characters of roses: Five brothers of one house are we, All in one little family. Two have beards and two have none, And only half a. beard has one. To understand the rhyme, find a dog-rose (there’s one growing in a tree-stump in the Riccarton House carpark) and look at the five sepals that will still be attached to the end of the hip. Two of them will have no lobes, two will have lobes on both sides, and one will have lobes on one side only. All wild roses, by the way, have five-petalled flowers — with the exception of a single species from the Himalayas and central China. The hips of wild roses in New Zealand vary in size and shape, from the tiny blackish red ones of Rosa multiflora to the to-mato-red ones of the rugosa rose, which are the size of small apples. If I were picking for jam or wine I would look for the latter! Rosehip marmalade is dead easy to make if you follow this recipe from “Spon’s Household Guide” (1887):

Gather hips when perfectly ripe, wash them, and boil them in water, in the proportion of y 2 pint water to 11b fruit. When quite tender, pass them, water and all, through a sieve fine enough to keep back all the seeds. To each lib pulp put 11b refined sugar, and boil until your marmalade will jelly well. When a little cooled, pour it into jelly glasses or small jars, with a few small pieces of preserved ginger in each glass. Cover while hot. Here’s an alternative treatment, from the same book: Hip jam. — Collect the hips from the rose bushes when ripe, boil them in water until they become soft enough to be easily crushed, and press them through a very fine sieve. Take an equal weight of sugar to that of the fruit, boil the hips, when pulped through the sieve, very thoroughly with sugar, and put the jam into a large stone jar. It is liable to ferment a good deal, and therefore requires space. When taking any out for use, mix and stir it up well with a little white wine, and add sugar to taste if required. This jam is excellent, either for eating alone as a sweetmeat, or for making sauce. As a matter of interest: the greater rose family is a very large one which includes many ornamental and economic plants: all the cherries, peaches, nectarines, apricots, apples, pears, cotoneaster, firethorns, hawthorn, and many others including, of course, the medlar. The latter is a traditional English and European fruit tree which is very seldom seen nowa-

days, except occasionally as an ornamental tree (it has hairy leaves and large white flowers resembling pear blossom, and its crooked branches give it a picturesque outline). A reader asked about it last week-end, after I’d written about another traditional fruit, the mulberry. The medlar’s botanical name is Mespilus germanica and its original habitat is believed to be Central Europe and West Asia; although it grows wild in woodlands in the south of Britain, it is not considered to be indigenous there. It has small, hard fruit, like pears that have been squeezed from each end. When ripe, the fruit turn brown. Surviving trees in old gardens are evidence that medlars were among the first European fruit introduced to New Zealand. I know of several venerable specimens, but they are not common. One of the best known used to grow near the ChristchurchAkaroa highway, outside an old cottage west of Birdlings Flat. The cottage has been demolished and when I last looked at the medlar tree, about five years ago, it was moribund. I imagine it is dead by now. It’s easy to understand why medlars lost popularity as fruiting trees: the fruit lack glamour. They ripen the colour of brown rot, and according to old English recipe books must be rotten-ripe before being used. This state was attained by a process known as “Netting.” Quite a number of people have, however, planted medlar trees in the last few years; and in due course will produce

fruit. So is there anything you can do with them — other than sit and watch them rot? Yes. Try this recipe, again from “Spon’s Household Guide”: Guava Jelly, Imitation. — This is made from medlars. It takes a great quantity of medlars to make a small quantity of jelly, as they contain so little juice. Put the medlars, which must be ripe, into a preserving pan with just enough cold water to cover them. Let them cook gently until they are quite soft, then put them into a jelly bag, and let the juice drain off gradually; this will be a long process, as they must not be squeezed, or the jelly would not have the clear brightness of guava jelly. It is a good plan to leave them to drain all night. To every pint of juice allow 11b best white sugar, pounded. Boil them together in a preserving pan, stirring constantly with a silver or wooden spoon to prevent burning, and carefully removing the scum as it rises. It will probably take about y 2 hour to boil, but it must be tested by dropping a little from time to time on a cold plate; when it jellies it is done, and must then be poured off into small jars or moulds, care being taken that they are not only clean but perfectly dry. The next day tie them down in the usual way, and keep in a cool, dry place. When this is properly made it resembles guava jelly very closely, both in colour, flavour, and consistency. Wine can.be made from medlars. Use any basic recipe for rosehip wine, and substitute ripe medlars for the hips. - k