Saskatoon Berry Recipes

Saskatoon Berry Pie | Fiesta Farms

Growing up in Manitoba in the 1960s and ‘70s, a large fam­ily could still be counted as an asset.  Much of the work involved actual hands and backs — stack­ing hay bales on flatbed trail­ers in the field, and then rid­ing back, one of a jostling group of sib­lings, to the farm­yard where we piled the bales once more into moun­tain­ous stacks in the hayshed, super­vised impa­tiently and ener­get­i­cally by our father.

My mother also put the hands and backs of her chil­dren to work — in the gar­den, the kitchen, and in ‘the woods’, as we called the uncul­ti­vated land bor­der­ing my father’s fields, where we descended dur­ing the hottest weeks of the sum­mer to pick plums, chokecher­ries and saska­toon berries as they ripened.

The saska­toon berries came first.  Not quite blue­ber­ries, saska­toon berries are a sim­i­lar dusky blue, but smaller than their cen­tral Canada cousin.  In fact, saska­toon berries, I dis­cover, are closer to apples in struc­ture than blue­ber­ries, with small crunchy seeds at their heart.  Their name comes from a Cree word, mis-sask-quah-toomina, sim­pli­fied by prairie immi­grants into ‘saskatoon’.

We chil­dren were sent into the woods with plas­tic pails that had once held ice cream, which we were expected to return, filled with berries.  There was much debate about which imag­i­nary line on the bucket walls defined full or half-full, or indeed two-thirds or two-eighths.  When you are young, such debates are plea­sur­able, eas­ily become heated, and occa­sion­ally result in vio­lence and over­turned pails.

For every berry dropped into our pails, many more were eaten, drenched in the sun­shine that also warmed our backs, browned our wiry arms, and found a voice in the sum­mer drone of mos­qui­toes, but­ter­flies — some­times accom­pa­nied by the sharp bite of a horse­fly — and the dis­tinc­tive trill of the red-winged black­birds.  A June sym­phony per­fectly scored for the seem­ing eter­nity required to fill a bucket or engage in math­e­mat­i­cal debate.

My mother was for­tu­nate in her brood of nine.  Yes, nine.  Born diplo­mat that my mother was, she claimed she would have liked ten.   I digress.  Although not really, since the warmth of the sun, the sweet­ness of the berries, and my mother’s innate tact lie at the heart of my rec­ol­lec­tions about my mother and food.

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