HEALTHY INGREDIENT
Pork Loin with Huckleberry Thyme Sauce
HUCKLEBERRY The Great Western By S. MICHAL BENNETT Photography By JOEL RINER
I don’t recall having known about huckleberries before moving to Idaho almost 20 years ago. Peo- ple are kind of obsessive here over huckleberries and huckleberry prod- ucts. In fact, any good tourist-entic- ing place in the Inland Northwest pretty consistently offers some sort of food or drink item that contains huckleberries. Huckleberry lemon- ade, ice cream, jam, sauce, dessert, pastry, taffy, beer, wine, soap and so much more. In researching this little purple berry, I discovered there are also two berries, two different genera, named “huckleberry” in the U.S., both na- tive to the Americas. Eastern huck- leberries, genus Gaylussacia, has a thick skin, 10 hardy seeds, are ei- ther black or blue and grow a single berry from the base of leaves on new
shoots. Western huckleberries, ge- nus Vaccinium (same genus as blue- berries), have a thinner skin, soft seeds, can range in color from black to red, and grow in small clusters, similar to blueberries. It is the West- ern huckleberry, and the Vaccinium globulare variety that is most prolif- ic in the high mountains of Montana and Idaho, that we in the Northwest crave and hunt for every summer. This is what I will refer to as “huck- leberry” forthwith. The official state fruit of Idaho since 2000, the huckleberry has also been a staple of life for Northwest and Rocky Mountain Native Amer- ican tribes for thousands of years. In 1806, Lewis and Clark wrote about tribes extensively using dried huck- leberries in their foods. Captain Meriwether Lewis wrote about eat-
ing “dried cakes of berries” and cook- ing them into a breakfast pudding with flour. Northwest tribes would pick huckleberries using salmon backbones or wooden “combs” and sun dry or smoke them so they kept longer. The Sawtooth Berry Fields in Washington’s Gifford Pinchot Na- tional Forest is a protected cultural site of the Yakama Nation where Na- tive American peoples have harvest- ed berries for thousands of years. Although Oregon is home to a unique berry breeding program, a collaboration between Oregon State University and USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, domestic or com- mercial cultivation of huckleberries remains elusive. These wild little berries thrive at high elevations, in acidic soil (often burn areas), cold winters, short growing seasons and
46 NSPIREMAGAZINE.COM
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online