The Hirshon Medieval Iced Blueberries in Sweet Cream – Fresen Myrtus in Crème Bastard

Blueberry is a widely distributed and widespread group of perennial flowering plants with blue or purple berries. They are classified in the section Cyanococcus within the genus Vaccinium. Blueberries are usually prostrate shrubs that can vary in size from 10 centimeters (4 inches) to 4 meters (13 feet) in height. In commercial production of blueberries, the species with small, pea-size berries growing on low-level bushes are known as “lowbush blueberries” (synonymous with “wild”), while the species with larger berries growing on taller, cultivated bushes are known as “highbush blueberries”.

Canada is the leading producer of lowbush blueberries, while the United States produces some 40% of the world’s supply of highbush blueberries. Many species of blueberries grow wild in North America, including Vaccinium myrtilloides, V. angustifolium and V. corymbosum, which grow on forest floors or near swamps. Vaccinium myrtillus (bilberry or European blueberry) and Vaccinium uliginosum (bog bilberry/blueberry, northern bilberry or western blueberry) are the main European cultivars.

Lowbush blueberries, sometimes called “wild blueberries”, are generally not planted by farmers, but rather are managed on berry fields called “barrens”. Commercially-offered blueberries are usually from species that naturally occur only in eastern and north-central North America. Other sections in the genus are native to other parts of the world, including the Pacific Northwest and southern United States, South America, Europe and Asia.

The names of blueberries in languages other than English often translate as “blueberry”, e.g. Scots blaeberry and Norwegian blåbær. Blaeberry, blåbær and French myrtilles usually refer to the European native V. myrtillus (bilberry), while bleuets refers to the North American blueberry. Russian голубика (“blue berry”) does not refer to blueberries, which are non-native and nearly unknown in Russia, but rather to their close relatives V. uliginosum (bog bilberries).

Blueberries may be cultivated, or they may be picked from semiwild or wild bushes. In North America, the most common cultivated species is V. corymbosum, the northern highbush blueberry. Hybrids of this with other Vaccinium species adapted to southern U.S. climates are known collectively as southern highbush blueberries. Highbush blueberries were first cultivated in New Jersey around the beginning of the 20th century.

So-called “wild” (lowbush) blueberries, smaller than cultivated highbush ones, have intense color. V. angustifolium (lowbush blueberry) is found from the Atlantic provinces westward to Quebec and southward to Michigan and West Virginia. In some areas, it produces natural “blueberry barrens”, where it is the dominant species covering large areas. Several First Nations communities in Ontario are involved in harvesting wild blueberries.

“Wild” has been adopted as a marketing term for harvests of managed native stands of lowbush blueberries. The bushes are not planted or selectively bred, but they are pruned or burned over every two years, and pests are “managed”.

An excellent historical analysis of bilberry (the European version) is herewith excerpted from https://www.ahpa.org/herbs_in_history_blueberry:

Classical Berries – The Rise of Blueberry:

The West, as for it, went through a first phase of loss of information followed by a second phase of slow recovery from the time of Charlemagne on (late 8th/9th centuries) characterized by a first reappropriation of the classical literature. When studying blueberry, physicians had to cope with a difficult problem: since blueberry does not appear in the classical literature (as it is not typical of the Mediterranean environment), they did not find a word to designate it in the classical heritage.

They did use an existing term, which they transferred from one plant genus to another in a creative way. This transfer was based on the external similarity of the fruit. They thus took the term myrtus, which designates Myrtus communis L. in the classical literature, to identify blueberry. However productive it was, this transfer sometimes generated confusion because of the overlapping of blueberry and myrtle.

After the medico-botanical manuals of Classical Antiquity became more easily available again in the West (even though, from the 11th century on, it was in the form of Latin translations of earlier Arabic versions), the Latin medical literature of the Late Middle Ages, when discussing blueberry, provided used the description and indications typical of myrtle in a confusion that was further transmitted to the Renaissance.

Renaissance Differentiation:

This amalgam is nowhere clearer than in the translation of, and commentary on, Dioscorides’ De materia medica by the famous Italian physician Pieto Andrea Mattioli (1501-1577). A great classicist erudite, Mattioli devoted his entire career to the study of Dioscorides’ work, even when he was physician to the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in Prague.

From a simple translation into Italian as early as 1544, he rapidly shifted to a deep analysis of the work to assess the possibility to use it as a manual of materia medica in a different natural environment: the central-northern European, instead of the Mediterranean. In so doing, he introduced into his commentary on Dioscorides the plant species of this new environment, proceeding by assimilation, mostly basing these associations on external botanical similarity. This is how we find blueberry in his commentary on Dioscorides’ chapter devoted to myrtle, in accordance with the medieval use.

Contrary to his medieval predecessors, however, Mattioli distinguished the two genera. His text is worth citing:

“In Germany and Bohemia, where no species of myrtle grows, they use … a plant called “Myrtillus”. It grows in the mountains and the forests … leaves like those of Buxus … From its flowers … grow the berries, which are like those of Juniper for their color and their size, but full of a juice like wine … This plant is used in all Germany instead of myrtle, of which it has similar therapeutic properties …

It was the Flemish medical botanist Rembert Dodoens (1517-1585) who distinguished blueberry from myrtle under the name Vaccinia. In his Pemptades originally published in 1583, with a posthumous second edition in 1616 referred to here, he characterized blueberry as early as the 2nd/3rd lines of its description as a bay (read: berry, bacca in Latin), and not by its flower as usual at that time. His description, partially reproducing that of Mattioli, leaves no ambiguity (Illustration 5):

The black berries are most common in Germany, the fruit of which is called by some Myrtillus … with leaves of the greater Buxus … berries quite corresponding to those of Juniper by their size, with, at their top, a concavity like the navel … their color from dark blue to black, with a slightly acid taste, astringent … the berries appear toward the end of June and in July … As far as I know, they do not have a name among the Greeks and ancient Latins …

After a discussion—and elimination—of all the plants mentioned in the Greek and Latin literature of Classical Antiquity that might bear some similarity to Vaccinia, Dodoens explains the name he gave to the berries:

[The berries] Vaccinia might not seem to be identified as fruits, since they are berries (bacca in Latin). Indeed, from bacca they might be called Vaccinia as well as Baccinia … (that is, small berries, as per the suffix -inium added to bacca; hence, baccinium singular, baccinia plural) … The term Vaccinia was not created by Dodoens; it already appears in Classical Latin. However, as Dodoens himself explains, it identifies an aquatic plant in Latin literature. Here instead, Dodoens uses it to designate a plant that grows in high mountains exposed to winds, which does not appear to be known in Italy. The point for him was to characterize the plant by its berries, which he identified as baccae (plural; bacca singular).

Dodoens then concluded with the property (quite cooling) and action of this plant (astringent and desiccative). As such, it relieves stomachache, quenches thirst, reduces burning fever, stops diarrhea and vomiting, dysentery caused by an excess of bile, and is useful against excess of bile (cholera).

The choice of the term Vaccinia by Dodoens attests to a solid classical education and a great linguistic awareness with the shift from b to v in the pronunciation, with b pronounced v, according to a phenomenon still attested in Greek and Spanish. Hence baccinia pronounced and written vaccinia. However erudite the designation might have been, it left the subsequent generations of botanists, taxonomists, and philologists with a conundrum still looming in present-day botanico-medical literature.

As for the (to modern ears) humorous name of crème bastard, I rely on this edited, scholarly excerpt from tophatheritage.co.nz:

The recipe for crème bastarde comes from the medieval cookbook, academically named, Harleian manuscript 297. The manuscript was written around 1430 during the reign of King Henry VI, and it is probable that it was written by the royal cooks but this is not known. Incidentally this was the same year Joan of Arc was captured.

Professional cookbooks first appeared in England around 1390 with The forme of Curry (‘curry’ originally meant ‘cooking’ in old English) – a scroll of recipes written by the royal cooks of King Richard II. Medieval cookbooks weren’t written for the masses. They were written for kings, partly to record the kings favourite meals so that new cooks could be quickly brought up to speed, and partly so that kings could show off the lavish food they were eating to other kings!

Because these scrolls were written for professional cooks by professional cooks, they very seldomly included the amounts of ingredients or cooking times. The thinking was that a royal cook would know how long to bake a pastry, or how much cinnamon will taste good with the other ingredients. So why bother writing it down?

This makes things tricky for us trying to work out the recipes seven centuries later.

As an aside, what we would consider modern recipe books, including ingredient amounts and cooking times, began appearing around the 17th century.

These early cookbooks are written in middle English, and commonly include at least two letters that have dropped out of the modern alphabet; ſ – the ‘long S, typically used when you wanted a hard ‘S’ sound, and þ – ‘thorn’, a letter that represented the ‘th’ sound.

Then you have the obsolete prefixes i- and y- that give the proceeding verb a past tense. Descriptive words that are no longer used. Phonetic spelling. Medieval shorthand. And archaic names for ingredients – the best example of this being ‘egg’, which is a word introduced by the Vikings. The original English word for egg is eyroun.

In a nutshell – this is a rare Medieval recipe that tastes very familiar to modern palates – and tastes good, with My freezing of the blueberries being a testament to Harald of the Frozen North and his love for blueberries (I also love the cold!)! I have, in my own inimitable fashion, tweaked the ingredient list for the crème bastard to include other flavors that would have been found in a high-end, noble version of this recipe suitable for a King’s palate – or mine own, complete with spices and essences that would have been worth a King’s ransom in the Middle Ages!

For the blueberries, My go-to is the Fruitist Jumbo brand – with Driscoll’s Limited Edition being a close second – both brands offer very large, crunchy berries with an intense sweetness. I have added several rare spices (at least they were rare in the Middle Ages in Western Europe!) that enhance the overall flavor profile of the recipe. Grains of Paradise are the only spice that is difficult to find in your supermarket, but you can buy a good brand on Amazon here. Honey with a bit of rosemary added provides the herbal essence so beloved in many sweet recipes from this period of history as well.

Citizens, this is a very simple recipe to make (a rarity for TFD!) and it is one that I hope will prove worthy to share at a Medieval-themed meal – or ANY meal – to be served in your immediate future! Few things are simultaneously as rich and refreshing as this Medieval treasure from the history books!

Battle on – the Generalissimo

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