Pine Syrup Panna Cotta

“Do you want to go see the dunes?” my niece asks almost as soon as we get to Fort Mahon-Plage, and takes us to a stand of black pines behind the old family cottage. I don’t understand “dunes” until I realize that the pines that the boys have planted behind their family home are there to hold sandy soil in place, in the last of four dune formations that fall in successive bands from the seashore going inland.

I’ll take you along on our walk through those dunes, both the ones in the backyard and others in a nearby reserve all in a separate post because we found much, much more than can be crammed into just one. Suffice it now to say that beyond the shape-shifting coastal dunes, beyond the embryonic Dunes a Oyats with European beach grasses (“Oyats”) to stabilize, beyond the shrub and thorn dunes–only then come the Dunes Boisées or the Pine dunes. Plantations of Laricio pines [P. nigra subsp. laricio, black pines or Austrian/Corsican pines] are common, often as shelterbelts, as they are now in this backyard.

Along the hedges or spread like mats in corners are wild privets [Ligustrum Vulgare], Cotoneaster [one of several hundred varieties], common spindles [Euonymus europaeus], and common snowberries [Symphoricarpos albus]. There are the odd mushrooms, too, and the lone egg that someone perhaps stole from the chicken coop next door and abandoned in the woods.

But what call us really are the dark pine stands, even though it is the wrong season for everything. Pollen cones look worn and bare, only a few stray pine cones are green enough to be jammed, and green tips there are none to be had.

What I picked in the end were largely winter buds covered in sticky, resinous brown-whitish bud scales–pines prepare for the coming winter by encasing future flowers and leaf-tips in scaly weatherproofing such as this. Possibly these are the very “cryptoblasts” A.W. Borthwick identified in 1899, some candle-like, some plump and bulbous, some at the very ends of branchlets, others at internodes.

Other bits harvested: some microstrobilus or aggregates of immature male pollen cones in a pre-catkin stage, some megastrobilus, cone inflorescences or aggregates of immature female ovulate or seed cones. And then a handful of tiny but perfectly formed, woody female pine conelets, maybe a year old or less which are unsuitable for mugolio.

While there are guides aplenty on collecting fir tips or pollen or fermenting young, green pine cones, nobody really tells you what to do with such bits and bobs as you can find in off-seasons–or about pinus nigra as a source of edible parts, generally. I did find this intriguing reference to a springtime spruce beer, though Lambert is clearly referring to a North American subspecies, the black spruce fir:

“P. nigra grows wild only in New England, Canada, Nova Scotia, and the colder climates north- ward. It generally occupies a cold, moist, sandy soil. Its height in such places is from thirty to forty feet, and its diameter from one to two at, about the middle of the trunk, which is uneven, and the branches reach to the ground. The bark, both of the trunk and the branches, is blackish, but the wood has a reddish white colour; the latter is light, and full of large veins. In cases of necessity, it is used by the Americans for building fishing-boats, and small vessels. The top of the tree is impregnated It is at its greatest strength in the spring, when an extract is made from with fine resinous particles. as well as from those of P. alba, with which Spruce beer is brewed. the leaves and young shoots, Some persons are of opinion that the extract made from the former species, is better than that made from the latter. The leaves are little more than half an inch in length, slender, tetragonal, and of a dark but they are small. The scales of these are of a e from the former species, is better than that made from the latter. green colour. The cones assume an oval shape, ! coriaceous texture, and large in proportion to the dimensions of the cone. In Cone and Noe Scotia the seed ripens about the end of November, but is not shed before the following spring. This tree is not so much cultivated in this country as it deserves” [Lambert 1832: Tab 27, p. 41].

Otherwise, the tree’s primary utility in the EU is, as we saw, to secure dunes and other calcareous soils, plus to withstand the effects of environmental pollution, or to serve as bioindicator of pollution levels in a region.

I went mostly by what’s generically known about pines, with all the standard cautionary warnings about yew and ponderosa. The point was to extract flavor, the terpenes, most specifically the alpha-pinene responsible for that identifiable “pine scent” which acts as a protectant from pathogens, grazing animal foragers, and a bit like the uses of turpentine as a varnish, to protect against water loss. Maybe fresh pine oil has a slew of benefits, but what I was after was just a taste. I knew I wasn’t going to get much, but a little was already going to be plenty.

The simplest thing would have been just to throw all my bits together with sugar and let them ferment, in much the same way as it’s done with green pine cones. But after several pitstops along the way between Fort Mahon Plage and home, several transfers from luggage to fridge, a thousand miles of travel and an overlong layover in Singapore, it felt safer to boil, steep overnight, sweeten, boil again to syrup and store.

So that’s what I did. The buds responded rather fascinatingly to that last sweetening and boiling. For one, that’s when the resinous-ness appeared most palpable, producing crystalline-looking bits that were hard to remove. But more, they all “bloomed”–opened out completely into tiny flowers or strange sea-creature-like forms as would never have been seen on the actual pine trees themselves, but which now stretched themselves out in my jars.

Panna Cotta was an after thought. This Laricio pine syrup could well be added as a flavoring to drinks or spooned over pancakes of any kind, including malpuas, but hey, pines and all those flavors collected in a French fall felt right Christmassy and the panna cottas set firmly enough to be stacked like the pyramidal trees we’d left behind.

“They should be called pine-a cotta, no?” I quipped to the son and the niece. The former responded with eye rolls, the latter with her characteristic chuckle and smile.

These panna cottas need to be made barely sweet, so the black pine taste can do all the talking. Gelatin tastes just don’t sit well with me any more, so I subbed for agar agar/ kadalpasi (in Tamil) or “China grass”–but the strands, not powder, so some care needs to be taken in measuring this out to get that perfectly soft, creamy, yielding panna cotta or “cooked cream” texture. The image below indicates roughly how much to use for the liquid proportions given below.

Sources

Galloway Wild Foods, Foragers’ Guide to Conifers

Duhamel du Monceau, M., 1700-1782 (Author) Redouté, Pierre Joseph, 1759-1840 (Artist). 1801-1819. Traité des arbres et arbustes que l’on cultive en France en pleine terre. New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Lambert, Aylmer Bourke. 1832. A description of the genus Pinus: illustrated with figures; directions relative to the cultivation, and remarks on the uses of the several species: also descriptions of many other trees of the family of Coniferæ.

Micieta, Karol & Murín, Gustáv. (1998). Tree Species of Genus Pinus Suitable As Bioindicators of Polluted Environment. Water Air and Soil Pollution. 104. 413-422. 10.1023/A:1004984121831.

Stone, Earl L., and Margaret H. Stone. “Dormant Buds in Certain Species of Pinus.” American Journal of Botany, vol. 30, no. 5, 1943, pp. 346–51. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2437519. Accessed 16 Dec. 2023.