A berry by any other name

This weekend I made my first large‑scale shopping expedition since vacationing in Germany and Hungary with my 9‑month‑old son. My marketing was moving along swimmingly until I hit the produce department. I must have spent 20 minutes wandering through carefully constructed mounds of fruits and vegetables, stupefied, unable to make any choices, until I realized my dilemma.

By and large, produce in American supermarkets is subpar, the pits, and after my little European jaunt, colossally disappointing.

Take strawberries, for example. Or smell them rather. These rock‑hard, ruby‑red nuggets look like strawberries, but rarely in markets here can you lift one of those little plastic boxes to your nose and experience the eau de strawberry. If a berry doesn’t smell like a berry, is certainly isn’t going to taste like one.

In Berlin, we caught the tail end of berry season. On random street corners, one will find adorable little booths, red and shaped like a strawberry, with a vendor inside selling the most fragrant version of the fruit: So ripe they must be consumed within a day or two, nothing like the strawberries we find here that stay firm for a week in the ice box. Die erdbeere  may not all be gem‑like in appearance, but they taste like perfumed precious gems. I bought a basket, and my son and I consumed them at a playground in a nearby park.

We also were fortunate to savor the last part of the spargel, or asparagus season–this includes both green and white asparagus. On café and restaurant menus, one will find dish after dish based on the vegetable at the height of its season. It will be offered in soups and salads, roasted, and as side dishes. A diner could have a four‑course meal, with each course incorporating the coveted spears. And when the season ends, its appearance on local menus diminishes considerably as the local supply dwindles and eventually disappears until the following summer.

A couple of days in Budapest were spent taking in some impressive architecture, learning a smattering of the city’s intense history, and perusing some of the expansive markets bearing sausages, cheese, spices, pork, produce and poultry–even foi gras.

Peppers are a staple in Hungary, hence the famed Hungarian spice, paprika. And in the markets, piles of just‑picked peppers, firm and fragrant, awaited the hands of eager cooks. More varieties of squeaky‑clean cabbage than I have ever seen in one locale were stacked precariously at the hind of smaller, more colorful vegetables. Mounds of fungi, including truffles (at a fraction of U.S. prices) made me long for a week in Budapest and a kitchen in which to do nothing but cook.

Many of the markets in Budapest were massive and staggering in their variety, but the closer we came to the origin of the produce, the more impressed I became. A long bus ride from Budapest to Vesprem revealed an agricultural countryside abundant with fruit trees, family gardens thick with tomatoes and squash, and acre after acre of five‑foot‑tall sunflowers bowing reverently toward the sun. At this visual feast, I became excited about what I might find in some of the smaller towns we would be visiting.

A brief stay at the home of my Hungarian friend’s mother allowed me to explore her extraordinary garden. And as I was marveling at the perfection of her weed‑free rows, and the proliferation of splendid specimens, raspberry bushes, sour cherry trees, fresh eggs from her chickens, she apologized. Her garden, she said, was not so good this year. I thought of my sad attempt at herbs and tomatoes this year in Phoenix and had to chuckle.

But it was a four‑day stay in the town of Balatonalmadi, situated on Lake Balaton, the largest lake in Central Europe, that truly reminded me of what fruit is meant to taste like. On the street where we rented a house, the cobbled sidewalk was shaded from the afternoon sun by apple, pear and apricot trees. Grape vines, popping with the luscious green fruit, were in a tangled battle with apple tree branches for the morning sun. Thousands of sour cherries were positively dripping from their tress, the branches heavy and awaiting the relief of harvest.

But one of the craziest sights to behold during that particular stay was a tree in the neighboring yard. The tree was orange. Apricot rather. So filled with the fruit it was, it appeared more apricot in color than green.

A trip to the lake for the day meant sandwiches of local sausage and pepper on bakery bread, some apricots plucked from the tree, and a basket of sour cherries that a few hours earlier, were dangling from spindly branches.

This abundance doesn’t last. It’s the reason so many rural folk “put up” during the summer. Fruits are canned, stewed, frozen (for those who have a decent size freezer–not common) and made into jam. Vegetables are likewise canned, stewed, frozen and pickled, thus providing a taste of summer through the often harsh winters there.

Experiencing this sensory scenery each day forced me to ponder the common American ideal of produce–availability of everything, all the time. Sure it’s nice to find asparagus in December, and strawberries in April, but not if they don’t resemble in taste, texture or scent, their seasonally grown counterparts.

As our culture grows further from the origins of our food, and as our taste memories are replaced each year with watered down versions of what we sampled the year before, I wonder what the future holds. (Europe is certainly not immune to this fate, as agriculture in many countries is following in America’s footsteps.) Will we know only sweet and salty? Will we lose the ability to recognize the nuance of flavor?

Some of us already have.

In a world of Hummers and valet parking at Nordstrom and P.F. Changs, a little thing like a great strawberry may seem a trifle. But I see it as symbolic: the mighty Hummer (mighty pretentious that is) versus the tiny, seasonal berry.

I’ll take the berry any day.