Blueberries in Cole Slaw? Why Not?

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The Machias Blueberry Festival, held a couple weekends ago, features a cooking contest each year with lots of categories from appetizers to pickles to beverages, adult and child sections, best pie, best overall, and judges choice. I had the privilege of being one of the four judges together with longtime Friend of Taste Buds column Ruth Thurston. We nibbled our way through thirty-three entries.

Overall, there was no lack of discussion among us about what makes for a good blueberry dish, especially Maine’s official dessert, Blueberry Pie.

Compared, say, to strawberries, blueberries are a pretty subtle fruit, and seem to develop more flavor after being cooked somewhat. Blueberries may be enhanced by the light use of a spice or flavoring like almond or cloves, but it is easy to overwhelm them. And wild blueberries are so tiny and precious that it seems a shame to blow them on a combination with another more assertive fruit like cranberries or in a glaze for meat whose flavor overwhelms the blueberry’s delicacy. I always looked for a solid, definitive blueberry flavor.

The most interesting discussions developed around pie. Pie is a tricky item: there are crusts that have to be just right, the bottom one needs to be baked, and one hopes for flakey, flavorful top crusts. In this contest, my favorite crust was on one pie but my favorite filling was in another. Ultimately, the filling won, but not until the judges had a vigorous discussion over how firm blueberry pie filling ought to be.

Of course, one doesn’t want to drink the filling so soupy ones don’t work, but neither do we wish to be able to bounce it on the floor, so tight fillings glued together with cornstarch or lots of tapioca aren’t quite the ticket. One of us was pretty certain that fillings should never run at all, but personally I can put up with a little dribbling as long as the flavor is solidly blueberry, which the winning pie was.

There were other deliciously blueberry-flavored items like a terrific jam and a great blueberry bar from a child entrant. But about half-way through I was a little dizzy from all the sweets and very happy to arrive at Salad and Entrees after having worked through lots of flour/sugar/shortening laden dishes. So it was cole slaw, named Machias Blueberry Slaw, entered by Michelle Van Hoose of Machias, made with blueberries and studded with jalapenos, which, inconsistently enough, left a big impression on me.

Personally, I wouldn’t waste wild blueberries on slaw unless I had an awful lot of them, but I’d toss in some of the high bush variety so when the eater chews along, he or she will get cabbage crunch, jalapeno bite, and a pop of sweet blueberry. There were shallots in it, too, I think; I didn’t write the recipe down but over the past few days I tinkered with the idea and came up with the following recipe inspired by Michelle’s creativity and flavored with some high bush berries I grew and got to before the birds did.

Looking for…October Bread. Eileen Delahunt wrote, “I’ve been looking for years for a a recipe I’ve lost. It was printed in the BDN umpteen years ago. It is for a yeast bread that calls for a cup of cooked winter squash.  I recall that it called for 1/3 cup of powdered milk but can’t recall the rest. I use to make it almost every weekend and it was everyone’s favorite.   I’m wondering if you are familiar with it or have any ideas where I might find it.   Thanks for any help you can give me.” Did any one of you clip that recipe and hang onto it? If so, will you share?

Blueberry, Jalapeno and Cabbage Slaw
 
Ingredients
  • ½ a small or ¼ a large head of cabbage, shredded finely
  • 1 to 2 shallots finely chopped
  • ½ to 1 small jalapeno, seeded and minced
  • Rice vinegar
  • Olive oil
  • 2 tablespoons mayonnaise
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • 1 cup of blueberries
Instructions
  1. Toss the cabbage, shallots, and jalapenos together while sprinkling with just a few shakes of the rice vinegar, and dribble in some olive oil, tasting as you go, and adding more to taste.
  2. Add the mayonnaise, salt and pepper and toss, taste again and adjust seasonings.
  3. Fold in the blueberries gently.
  4. Serve.

 

Sandy Oliver

About Sandy Oliver

Sandy Oliver Sandy is a freelance food writer with the column Taste Buds appearing weekly since 2006 in the Bangor Daily News, and regular columns in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors magazine and The Working Waterfront. Besides freelance food writing, she is a pioneering food historian beginning her work in 1971 at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she developed a fireplace cooking program in an 1830s house. After moving to Maine in 1988, Sandy wrote, Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Foods at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century published in 1995. She is the author of The Food of Colonial and Federal America published in fall of 2005, and Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie which she co-authored with Kathleen Curtin. She often speaks to historical organizations and food professional groups around the country, organizes historical dinners, and conducts classes and workshops in food history and in sustainable gardening and cooking. Sandy lives on Islesboro, an island in Penobscot where she gardens, preserves, cooks and teaches sustainable lifeways.