#103 | Short But Sweet 🌽
Bramble of Blackberry
Hello!
We were slammed this week working on a cookbook project, so this is going to be a short one. From the archives:
September is one of our favorite poetry months because there are so many poems about blackberries. As poet Robert Hass notes, “there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies.” Here’s a recent poem by Ada Limon that appeared in the 2021 edition of Pop-Up Magazine, which was distributed in a box since the pandemic made it impossible to hold their usual event in person.
THORNS
Armed with our white plastic buckets
we set off in the safety of the noonday
heat to snag the full rubus of blackberries
at the bend of her family’s gravel road.
But before we even reached the end
of the driveway, a goose hung strangled
in the fence wire bloodless and limp. Her
long neck twisted, her hard beak open.
She was dead. Though we had been loosed
like loyal ranch dogs, we knew we should
go back, tell someone, offer help. Still,
sunburned and stubborn in the way only
long free days can make a body, we walked
to the thicket and picked. When we returned,
bloodied by prickles and spattered with stains,
we were scolded, not for secreting
the news of the dead goose, but for picking
too many berries. For picking all day
in the sun without worry for our own scratched
skin. I can still remember how satisfying
it was. How we picked in near silence, two
girls who were never silent. How we knew
to plunder so well, to take and take
with this new muscle, this new gristle,
what grew over us for good.
–Ada Limon
Pop-Up Magazine, 2021
By the way, I'm Bruce Cole, Publisher of Edible San Francisco. If you’re new here, welcome to EAT.DRINK.THINK., a newsletter spotlighting seasonal recipes, the latest SF Bay Area food news, poetry, and more!
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was the Edible Communities podcast: Is Plastic Waste the Cost of Eating?
Do you know someone who loves a good Rhum Punch? Send them this newsletter!
Speaking of Plastic: Went to Noriega Produce (aka Gus’s Community Market) this week to pick up some beef because we’re still grooving on the Hanger Steak with Tomato(es) Salsa recipe by Christian Reynoso from our last year’s summer issue. Gus’s always has a supply of hangers, might be the only place in the city that does? Needed some cherry tomatoes too, and we picked the cardboard container over the plastic clamshell. We’re trying to avoid all plastics (ahem), especially since the great plastic recycling scam was exposed in 2020 by NPR: How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled. And from a past Edible Alaska newsletter: “Writer Rebecca Solnit reminds us that big oil company BP actually popularized the idea of "carbon footprint” because it served them to make climate change seem like an individual responsibility.”
🧂 Season to Taste: J.J. Goode on the standard recipe instruction to “season to taste;” three words that have no real meaning because most of us don’t even know what we’re tasting for.
When I worked with Roberto Santibañez, a chef and restaurateur from Mexico City, I learned the difference that proper seasoning can make when preparing pico de gallo, a dish I’d previously known mostly as a meek collection of chopped tomato, onion, and cilantro that came with my fajitas at Tex-Mex chains. He told me if I could eat pico de gallo comfortably by the chipful, the condiment wasn’t sufficiently seasoned. He continued adjusting and tasting, ultimately adding enough lime, salt, and chili to the mixture to serve its intended purpose: to ignite a bowl of beans or the meat tucked into a tortilla with just a small spoonful. Get the recipe for the real deal here. The New Yorker
Related: Stop Seasoning With Salt And Pepper
🌽 King Corn: Remember the corn kid video? Well, Tariq, the star of that viral video has been named South Dakota’s official “Corn-bassador!” The Washington Post
On repeat this week, from the archives: Hawk for the Dove from Amanda Shires’ new album ‘Take It Like A Man.’
That’s all for this week.
We’re outta here. Be well and take care,
–Bruce
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"Despite its artistic intentions and its many accomplishments, humankind owes its existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains." —Anonymous