Arbutus Berry Jam

Jump to the Jamming

This jam will ever be a memory of Nantes, for me.

We were out, one blessedly non-rainy day, in search of some fantastical world of creatures re-created as machines in a place on the île de Nantes, an island in the middle of the river Loire, which once had received ships filled with slaves and bananas. That stretch now has just remnants-serving-as-mementoes–the banana hangar, used to ripen bananas brought from the Canary Islands; the cranes that once were the behemoths that built ships: three Titan models, “Noir” being from the 1940s and Grue Titan Jaune and Gris from the 50s now only standing sentinel at Quai Fernand-Crouan and Quai des Antilles respectively, after the dockyards moved to nearby Saint-Nazaire and the area upscaled with graffiti and cafes and picnic-inducing lawns.

I was most pleased to find chicory plants blooming at the base of Grue Titan Jaune, adding their bright little splashes of violet to an otherwise dull landscape; see the image above to the right.

Across the river is a “Memorial to the Abolishment of Slavery,” hundreds of ship names placed like labels on the pavement we can now walk over. But on this side there is Les Machines de l’île, which really we came in search of as a sort of synthesis of this machine-enamored industrial past married to the imaginaries of Jules Verne. Verne was born in Nantes on the Île Feydeau; his “hard” science fiction was famed for being concerned with being believable, even true, and his visions of underwater and overwater mechanical futures seem memorialized nowhere better than here.

“Either we know every variety of creature populating our planet, or we do not,” Verne wrote in the opening chapters of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, fathoming the monsters of the deep. “If we do not know every one of them, if nature still keeps ichthyological secrets from us, nothing is more admissible than to accept the existence of fish or cetaceans of new species or even new genera, animals with a basically ‘cast–iron’ constitution that inhabit strata beyond the reach of our soundings, and which some development or other, an urge or a whim if you prefer, can bring to the upper level of the ocean for long intervals.”

Animals of cast-iron constitutions now inhabit Les Machines de l’île, and it was them we had come to find. Though you see them first in this narrative, we found them last. Because going anywhere in the wintry-wet off-seasons has its downsides: the Jules Verne museum was closed as were near all shops, signage was poor and, in the absence of streams of people moving in any discernible direction, it was hard to tell where the project began or ended.

The Strawberry Tress of île de Nantes

That’s when the strawberry trees found us.

Red berries fallen about, yellow-orange-green-red still on the trees in little bunches looking perfectly Christmassy, and the long light of the afternoon holding them alluringly. I picked one up and, finding it soft-to-the-point-of-mushy and attractive, couldn’t resist licking my fingers. Sweet. If looks hadn’t won me over, taste did.

Pliny the Elder is said to have remarked that he’d eat just one–and while the echo chamber that is the internet continues to be all torn about whether that means the fruit is so special or so ignorable, Pliny actually appears to have been quite clear: “pomum inhonorum, ut cui nomen ex argumento sit unum tantum edendi/ The fruit is held in no esteem, the reason for its name being that a person will eat only one” [Latin source /Translation XXVIII].

Quite unlike Pliny, however, I didn’t find these berries plain at all and I was quite sure I wanted more.

The machines of the island of Nantes which had been the main draw now became something of a distraction. A saved airplane barf bag (clean, of course) came to my rescue, and I picked as many arbutus berries as the bag would hold without turning them all into a mush by the time we reached home.

Irish?

Arbutus unedo, the strawberry tree, the Irish strawberry tree’s berries, these were. The Latin name immortalizes Pliny’s remark; Linnaeus recorded it in his 1753 Species Plantarum. The common names, however, tell other stories.

It’s simple enough to understand just by looking, why this shrubby plant might take the name of the ‘wild forest strawberry’ or “el lendj” in Algerian derdj [spoken/dialectal Arabic with strong Berber influence and other regional language words mixed in]. It’s red, a bit speckled and very soft when ripe. The Dutch/Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch painted it about as fantastically as Verne imagined machines in his “Garden of Earthly Delights” [c.1500, see below], which hangs now in the Prado in Madrid as part of the inventory of the Spanish crown, and in this rendition, the fruits are presented as distinctly strawberry-like.

It’s not so easy to understand its Irish origins, though many will tell you that ubhla caithne as it is called in Gaelic is native to Ireland because “charcoal associated with the mining on Ross Island, Lough Leane, [dates] to c.4,200 years ago” [Skeffington and Scott 2021: 393]. Yet, even 4200 years doesn’t by itself a native make. The nativity of Arbrutus Unedo has been a matter of debate for 150 years because the main areas of distribution are along the northern shores of the Mediterranean and significantly in the Iberian peninsula, and the Irish population is disjunct, thought to be part of the Hiberno-Lusitanian flora: a group of plants found only in southwest Ireland and the Iberian peninsula. Could the population have been pre-ice age holdovers? Could they have just arrived via overland migrations after the last glaciation and then somehow become extinct in the intermediary locations? How is it they appear in the medieval myth of Diarmaid and Gráinne–and what, indeed, do the clues of translation from 10th century texts tell us [Skeffington and Scott 2021: 393]?

A 2016 phylogeographic investigation by Santiso et al., however, identifies “two key lineages, one centred on SW Iberia and the other on the Mediterranean coasts of France and Italy, with other populations exhibiting variants derived from these.” It thus concludes that the Arbutus “population sampled from Ireland must be a relatively recent introduction because of the absence of any private haplotypes unique to Ireland and, as it was genetically similar to populations in Iberia and not France, that the most likely origin for the Irish population was Iberia” [cited in Skeffington and Scott 2021: 389, 386; also see this].

The question that begs answering, then, is just how these plants came to Ireland in the first place–and Skeffington and Scott collate ecological, ethno-mytho-historical, palynological and archaeological records, survey areas where Arbutus Unedo is thought to be native, and find a “correlation between the seven clusters of A. unedo and the distribution of Bronze Age copper mines” [2021: 399]. Perhaps then the Iberian miners brought it as a source of food, for the wines and brandies that the fruit still is used to make–the Spanish Madroño Liqueur, Portuguese “Aguardente de Medroñho” and Albanian “Raki Kocimareje,” to name a few–or just as a tree which was culturally important for some other reason.

Then plants may have spread with coppicing, been integrated into local woodlands where they appear to have been champions of disturbed areas, and then of course spread by estate plantations as an ornamental–which is possibly how they came to North-Western France.

All this is only to speak of A. Unedo and its European antecedents, but the family is diverse, with very notable North American relatives, placing them among the Madrean-Tethyan flora [plants discontinuously distributed between Mediterranean Eurasia and coastal western North America, also sometimes called the Mediterranean–Californian disjunction]. Hileman et al. [2001: 131] report that “Three species of Arbutus occur in the Mediterranean region from North Africa to the Middle East; A. unedo, A. andrachne, and A. x andrachnoides. The latter is hypothesized to be of hybrid origin between A. unedo and A. andrachne … Arbutus canariensis is endemic to the Canary Islands. The remaining eight species of Arbutus occur in the Western Hemisphere. Of these, A. xalapensis [Texas madrone], A. texana, A. peninsularis, A. tessellata, A. arizonica, A. occidentalis, and A. madrensis have a Neotropical distribution with A. xalapensis being the most widespread and variable. Arbutus menziesii [also called the Pacific Madrone] extends from British Columbia to Baja California along the West Coast of North America. Because of the disjunct distribution between mediterranean climates of western North America and the Mediterranean Basin, Axelrod (1975) cited Arbutus as a component of the Madrean-Tethyan flora.”

To my knowledge, all the North American plants’ fruit are edible, too [see this], though I can’t say how tasty. Maybe Pliny the Elder just had the bad luck of tasting the “crimson berries” of an Arbutus relative? There’s a lovely introduction to 7 of the diversely distributed species here, which distinguishes the A. xalapensis [the Texas madrone] from the A. glandulosa [the Mexican Madrone], though many botanists treat the two as the same.

I’m not here speaking of the local cultural significance of the corbezzoli in Italy, where the poet Giovanni Pascoli saw the colors of the Italian flag in fruit, or of the madroño in Spain where bears apparently love the ripe fruit enough to get tipsy from eating too much–as with marula and elephants in eastern South Africa–and the bear and the strawberry tree are on Madrid’s coat of arms. Nor am I speaking of the presence of the arbutus in Salish and perhaps other legends of origin on the West Coast of the United States and Canada [watch this video on double speed, or it’s painfully slow].

But I met the strawberry tree in Nantes as an immigrant in an erstwhile dockyard that’s now a strange landscape of machines. And if being with plants is a way of truly being in a place, no matter the trajectories that had found me there, then that’s the vantage point that matters for now and the memory I carry with me.

Jamming Arbutus berries

Arbutus berries mush very easily in ripening and in cooking, but their “skin” if you can call it that, is very grainy–and while some texture is welcome, a lot of it just gets in the way of eating. So it’s best to pulp the fruit, cook in a little water, and then strain the grainy parts out. You lose the red flecks and tinges, but having them in would’ve made you lose it in other ways, so this is better.

From what I see online different arbutus berries have different colorations. The ones I found were this lovely fall shade of orange.

Once you have the pulp strained out, add sugar. I start by tasting, and adding in a roughly 1part fruit pulp-to 1/2 part sugar proportion, but adjusting to tartness.

Cook this until it thickens and a quickly cooled spoonful remains a mound and doesn’t run. You can leave it looser, like a sauce or a compote or thicken to a spreadable consistency. It won’t take you long, as the pulp here is naturally thick. In fact, it strikes me that it will do well as a fruit leather, but I didn’t have time to try.

Sources

Hileman, Lena C., Michael C. Vasey, and V. Thomas Parker. “Phylogeny and Biogeography of the Arbutoideae (Ericaceae): Implications for the Madrean-Tethyan Hypothesis.” Systematic Botany (2001), 26(1): pp. 131–143

Santiso, X., Lopez, L, Retuerto, R.1., & Barreiro, R. “Phylogeography of a widespread species: pre-glacial vicariance, refugia, occasional blocking straits and long-distance migrations.” AoB Plants 8 (2016).

Skeffington, Micheline Sheehy and Nick Scott. “Is the Strawberry Tree, Arbutus unedo (Ericaceae), native to Ireland, or was it brought by the first copper miners?” British & Irish Botany Vol. 3 No. 4 (2021).