I went hiking this weekend along the Sakatah Singing Hills Trail in southern Minnesota, enjoying the crisp fall air and the changing colors. The Sakatah Trail follows an old railroad bed that led from west to east, beginning and ending in Mankato and Faribault, Minn.
The section of the trail I hiked with the Man of the Place followed a creek that led to the Minnesota River. We’ve had a great deal of rain lately, and the creek burbled powerfully behind crowded thickets of elder and ash.
As we headed toward a more deeply wooded area of the trail, the MotP asked me if I could identify the trees on either side of the trail: short, broadleaf trees heavy with small black fruit. I looked, I touched, I smelled. And it hit me.
Ripe, wild chokecherries.
Laura writes about picking chokecherries along with the other fruit they found on Plum Creek. They’re small, cousins to the black cherry, and called “choke” because the tannins in the cherry are highly acidic if they’re picked before they’re ripe. According to some sources, chokecherries were a staple of Woodland American Indian diets, and foraging for the berries, drying and pulverizing them into fruit leather were annual tasks.
Today, many who are “in the know” about chokecherries plant them, rather than forage for them. But they still offer a ready source of vitamin C as well as a fresh, sweet accent to many meals. (The bears love them.) My grandmother had huge stands of chokecherries at the edge of the woods on her forty acres. When I was small, we’d help her pick them, and she’d make chokecherry jelly to spread on toast.
On the trail Saturday, I crushed a handful of berries in my hand as I pulled them off the tree with a little too much force. Perfectly ripe, they smelled sweetly of fall.
Anybody got a recipe for Chokecherry Jelly?