Cloudberries

If they tell you where they found them, they will have to kill you.

At the time you’re receiving this email in your inbox, I am on my way to the cabin.

The cabin:

The cabin.

We’re off to a weekend of hauling water from the stream and heating it on the wood stove.

A weekend of spending more than an hour doing the dishes. Not because it’s a lot of work but because I have to put down the dish cloth and grab the binoculars every time there is movement on the water, in case it is one of the resident loons landing.

A weekend of making filtered coffee into a thermos, and drinking it from the cup with the broken handle.

A weekend of perhaps finding some cloudberries. Because they’re supposed to be ready for picking now.

I want to tell you about cloudberries, these plump, bright orange cloud-like berries that have only one glorious berry on each plant.

I’m not going to tell you exactly where to find them, obviously.

Cloudberries are called multer in Norwegian, some people say molter. It’s untranslatable. “Heavenly mouthful” is a feeble attempt. Cloudberry is close enough.

I live in the southern part of Norway, where the cloudberries grow on select marshes up in the mountains, and the locations of the cloudberry marshes are well guarded secrets. If you ask the locals where they go to pick cloudberries, they become shifty eyed and very vague and the conversation goes from jovial to guarded before you can spell “faux pas”.

The true sign of belonging to a family is not when the father-in-law holds the tenderhearted speech at your wedding, but when they reveal the locations where they go to pick cloudberries.

Up north in Norway cloudberries are plentiful. You can come across vast marshes completely yellow with cloudberries. But in those areas the land owners have the berry-picking rights and it is forbidden to pick cloudberries without the permission of the proprietor. But in the southern parts of Norway, you are allowed to pick any wild berries everywhere.

Around our cabin (in Telemark, which is in southern Norway), there are marshes with cloudberries, and we are allowed to pick them. If we can find them.

A cloudberry, ripe and ready to pick. There is only one berry on each plant.

It is possible to buy cloudberry jam in grocery stores. Expensive, but possible.

I find the idea of cloudberry jam preposterous.

I even avoid freezing cloudberries to save for Christmas.

I also treat with silent contempt the idea of defiling these heavenly delicacies by smushing them up and mixing them with whipped cream, which is a common manner of serving cloudberries. “Cloudberry cream” is the most luxurious Christmas dessert served in Norwegian homes and consists of a miniscule amount of cloudberries (or, a spoonful or two of cloudberry jam) stirred into in vast quantities of whipped cream. I know that this method of serving them will make a small amount of cloudberries go a long way when making a large dessert for the whole extended family at Christmas, but I don’t like it. It’s like making Gin & Tonic with half a teaspoon of gin in each drink to make the gin last longer.

Cloudberries are truly wild berries.

I have never heard of a cloudberry farm, and have never heard of anyone even attempting to domesticate them.

Cloudberries are a fickle bunch. The spring weather has to be just right, not too warm too soon, and no frost. If there is the merest breath of frost when they bloom, there will be no cloudberries. When that happens, we can walk for miles in late July and only manage to gather a small handful of berries, even on marshes that where promisingly bestrewn with the delicate white cloudberry flowers in spring.

However, some years we are able to gather so many cloudberries that we have more than we can eat. Oh the joy! Then, and only then, will I freeze what we don’t eat at the cabin, and bring them out at Christmas, to be enjoyed as a special dessert.

Two years ago, we were able to pick this many cloudberries.

Husband and I partake in the most hedonistic of rituals: Eating the cloudberries right after we pick them instead of saving them for Christmas.

Cloudberries taste best after spending a day laboriously trekking across marshes hunting for them and gathering them in a small bucket, reverently eaten while they are still sun-warm heaped on a plate, sprinkled with sugar and and with a little heavy cream, like this:

But here’s the thing. Some people (heretics! savages!) don’t like cloudberries.

These poor souls have no taste for these berries. They find them too crunchy. There are rather large seeds in each little ball of deliciousness, kind of like raspberries. They think they taste weird. They just don’t get it. They have no understanding for the superb reverence with which the taste of these berries are to be treated.

I don’t mind. For every family member not liking cloudberries, there will be more for me.

“And what do they taste like?” I hear you ask.

The flavour of cloudberries is hard to describe.

My husband is the one who has offered the most accurate description: They taste like the breeze coming off the mountain and the sun warming your back.

The photos are taken by me. Text and illustrations in this article are created entirely by me without help from AI, but supported by numerous cups of tea and persistent encouragement from my personal assistant:

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