When life deals you dubious berries - make sloe gin!

So I was coming back from the supermarket today and passed by the Serbian fruit and veg market, which sets up shop on our street each Tuesday and Thursday.  It is mostly made up of people from the surrounding Serbian enclaves selling bits and pieces from their gardens.  One guy might be selling 6 pumpkins, while another is selling garlic cloves from a bucket.

A snaggle-toothed lady selling fruit caught my eye – because the fruit looked like blueberries.  I ventured closer and yep!  They were blueberries alright.  A massive bucket of them! 

Yippeeee!!  I thought.  Because I really love them.

I whipped out the bit of Serbo-Croat I knew (hi, how are you?) and asked how much for 1 kilo.  5 euros, she told me.  Bargain!  I thought!  And gave her a nod to go ahead and fill the plastic bag.

As the berries tumbled into the bag I was happily planning what I would do with my massive horde.  I’d eat handfuls of them fresh, then I might freeze a few to snack on later.  I could make a blueberry and apple pie, blueberry jam…

I handed her the 5 euros and she looked at me with confusion.  I showed her 5 fingers.  “Five?”  I confirmed, hoping she’d remember the deal I thought we’d agreed upon 2 minutes ago.  So she smiled and started tipping more berries into the bag.  “No no!  Not 5 kilos, 5 euros!”  I said, in English, of course, with no hope of her understanding what the hell I was saying.  By this stage we had about 6 vendors interested in what was going on.  Collectively they figured out that I was happy with 1 kilo, and that I just wanted to pay.  So she started rummaging around in her coin bag for change.  Which was strange, because I thought I’d given her the right amount.  There was a lot of discussion about how much change she should give me and she finally handed me 2 euros, and started digging around for more.  “That’s dobro!”  I said “3 euros for one kilo is dobro” (dobro meaning good, and the only word I could remember at that point).  “Dobro, dobro!”  I said to emphasise the point.  We were all happy.  I had a kilo of blueberries for around $4 and she had more money than she expected to get for her wares.

I gleefully took my bag of blueberries home gave a few a good rinse and popped them in my mouth.  

But oh the vileness!  Oh the horror!  They were bitter and made my mouth pucker.  And they had a pit in them.  I spat them out in the sink in disgust.

But what were they?  And more importantly, were they safe to eat??

So I began googling.  And I googled every blueberry look alike there was.  I learned what a huckleberry, crowberry, bilberry and hackberry was.  My fruit was none of these.  For a bit I thought it was a choke berry, then a choke cherry then a bird cherry, but finally decided it wasn’t any of these.  Then I came across an article about belladonna berries, which look like blueberries, and how a woman ate six of them and died. 

And I started to freak out.

So I took some photos of the berries and frantically emailed them off to Romain so he could ask his colleagues to identify them for me. 

These are the photos I took.  See how much they look like blueberries!

While I waited for a response, I monitored my vital signs.

He came back a few minutes later saying that his colleagues did know what they were – they were called kolonja in Albanian and good for diabetes.  But I couldn’t find anything on the internet that matched up.  So I was still a bit stressed.

Then about 10 minutes later another email came through with this link:  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prunus_spinosa

And I had found my berry.

Why, it was a sloe berry, of course!

I’ve never heard of it, and that’s because they are apparently quite rare, or at least rarely cultivated and sold commercially because they taste gross. 

Yep, that’s my berry!

Apparently the done thing with sloe berries (which aren’t a berry but a drupe, which I learned all about during my googling adventure) is to make sloe gin!  In fact it seems to be the only thing worth doing with these nasty little things.

So I have found a recipe – devised by these two likely lads:

http://www.sbs.com.au/food/recipes/sloe-gin

And tomorrow I am off to the store to by some glass jars a bag of sugar and some gin, so that in 6 months time, when I can drink again, I might enjoy a cheeky little sloe gin fizz.

“The Brits have been making sloe gin for hundreds of years by infusing the berries in high-proof gin, along with a little bit of sugar. The result is a liqueur that's tart, but with a delicious richness and depth of flavor.

Sloe gin was traditionally drunk in the depths of winter, as a warming drink, until the Americans got a hold of it and summer-ified it with citrus and soda water. Thus was born the Sloe Gin Fizz, arguably the most famous sloe gin cocktail out there”