The very berry love

My relationship with berries follows the same arc as so many relationships: ignorance, discovery, infatuation, growth, complacency and, then, happy coexistence.

Ignorance

Blissful ignorance sees me growing up thinking that raspberries came in a bottle of an overly sweet cordial that you’d dilute with water and drink after school. It was called mitz pettel (“raspberry juice”) and had never seen a fresh raspberry in its life.

Mine was by no means a fruit-deprived childhood. I grew up in Israel, surrounded by an abundance of the tree-grown sorts: fresh figs, pomegranates, lemons and dates. Apart from a glut of late-winter strawberries, though, fresh forest berries — the small fruits, like raspberries, blackberries and blueberries were just not around.

Discovery & infactuation

This hit me hard during what I rather grandly called the “European tour.” The reality was delightfully ungrand: It was 1986 and my best schoolmate and I landed in West Germany, bought two old bikes and proceeded to cycle through the Netherlands and Belgium, to Paris.

It took us a month and, along the way, I fell in love with berries. I couldn’t get enough of the delicious reality of low-lying bushes and plants offering up more fresh berries than I could possibly consume.

Growth & learning

This started when I was working in my first professional kitchen at Launceston Place in London, under the tutelage of chef Rowley Leigh. He was showing me how to make a summer pudding, and just as he had inverted the berry-filled and wine-soaked bread onto a platter to serve, he inverted everything I had thought about berries until then. For me, they were to be treated with a degree of reverence and restraint. However, Rowley was doing with berries what Middle Eastern cooks do with herbs: using them in absolute abundance. They were not things you would use to garnish or finish off a dish. They were the very building blocks of the dish itself.

Once I fully understood the brilliant power of giving berries the leading role in a dessert, I just rolled along with it. In fact, I possibly went a bit overboard, creating my own berry-filled, berry-topped, berry-dotted, berry-coated, berry-everything set of puddings: white chocolate mousse with crushed frozen berries; baked cheesecake with a light biscuit base like the ones I had growing up, now swirled through with a thick blackberry coulis; pies and turnovers stuffed to the brim with stone fruits or apples, alongside blackberries, raspberries or blueberries; and countless ice creams, parfaits, sorbets and semifreddos, all delightfully cold, sharply sweet and berry bright.

By the time I mastered berries, I also knew I wanted to become a pastry chef. Alas, rather than learning the fine art of French cake making as I thought I would, I found myself on a production line throwing raspberries onto individual crème pâtissière-filled tarts. Within a very short time, my love affair with berries had entered the posthoneymoon phase: complacency.

My relationship with berries has reached the happy stage of balanced coexistence. The berries are still there, of course, used in all sorts of ways in all sorts of dishes: blitzed to make a purée for icing or buttercream; kept whole in a batter, or slightly crushed so the juices start to bleed; hiding inside of a roulade, waiting to be revealed; or sitting royally in a pistachio tart.