Razzle Dazzle

The summer I was eight, my parents rented a house in scenic Scarsdale and sent me to a well-regarded day camp that I loathed.  The house was probably a very ordinary suburban house but it had two fascinating features: one was a DIY telephone, (better than two cans and a string but only slightly), connecting the upstairs with the downstairs. As an only child, the idea of a family going to that  much trouble to maintain communications knocked me out.   I was also interested in bushes in the backyard covered in white netting, although all by itself, the backyard was pretty terrific to a city kid.  My father explained that under the netting were raspberry bushes.  Imagine! Bushes that were going to yield fruit I adored, protectively covered so the birds couldn’t steal the harvest.

Fast forward to last Sunday when we went to Mad Tom, a local orchard in East Dorset, to pick raspberries.

I filled four half-pints in under forty-five minutes, tossing a few into my mouth strictly as quality control. The owners of Mad Tom have a view that goes on for miles and includes the Green Mountains in one direction and the Taconics in another.  Both the raspberry bushes and the apple orchards were planted by the present owner’s grandfather in the sixties and must yield a lot of fruit.

Green Mountains from Mad Tom

Archaeological evidence shows that raspberries were eaten by Paleolithic cave dwellers who didn’t have electric toothbrushes to remove the pesky seeds that lodge between the teeth. In Greek mythology, the berries were once white until Zeus’ nursemaid, Ida, pricked her finger on a thorn and her blood stained the berries red.  (Some kinds of raspberries are sort of pale pink, often called ‘white.’ Give me the red variety any day.)

What to do with this bounty? I flash froze some for later use in raspberry mousse.  We ate some. The rest became this incredibly easy raspberry sauce that is wonderful poured over vanilla ice cream, pound cake or, to suit some tastes, pancakes.

Berries on the stove just after adding the (dreaded) cornstarch mixture

Raspberry Sauce                                      

1 pint fresh raspberries

¼ cup sugar

2 T orange juice

2  T cornstarch (I know, good cooks eschew cornstarch but it’s not noticeable when you eat the sauce)

1 cup cold water

Combine raspberries, sugar and orange juice in a saucepan. Whisk the cornstarch into cold water until entirely smooth. Add the cornstarch mixture to the saucepan and bring to a boil.

Simmer for about five minutes stirring. Turn off the heat—the sauce cooks a bit more as it cools.

Puree the sauce in a blender or with a hand-held immersion blender and strain through a fine sieve. Serve warm or cold. Sauces keeps in the refrigerator for a good two weeks.

The finished product