adminThis pie has been a month in the making. I don’t mean I have been standing in my kitchen working on the pie for a month (yikes!); however, it has been on my mind for a month that I needed to make my first ever Blackberry Pie!
When we were visiting Northern California this past month we took our daily walk past a small local farm/nursery area. For several days we noticed (from across the street) that people would be really interested in a tree that hung over the fence. Of course we had to investigate and at first we found what looked like animal droppings or caterpillars on the sidewalk below. On closer inspection we realized that they were berries that had fallen off of the tree. The berries looked like blackberries but super long. Long blackberries. None of us had ever seen a berry like that before, so we went home and spent some time on Google looking for answers. The berry that most closely looks like the ones we found on that tree were mulberries. Turns out that these long mulberries are hard to find in grocery stores because they have a short season and they are very fragile. Since I couldn’t harvest these berries from someone else’s tree, my interest shifted (naturally) to blackberries.
This search made me realize that I have never made a Blackberry pie before. All the googling about berries made me really excited to make a pie. I also came across an interesting research study on the effects of blackberries on the motor and cognitive function in aged rats published in 2013. (Barbara Shukitt-Hale, Vivian Cheng & James A. Joseph (2009) Effects of blackberries on motor and cognitive function in aged rats, Nutritional Neuroscience, 12:3, 135-140, DOI: 10.1179/147683009X423292)
In their abstract they found that the polyphenolics found in the blackberries helped slow and even reverse age-related decrements in the motor and cognitive function in the aged rats. Well, if it can help old rats, maybe this pie can help me!!
I found this all super interesting, and I hope you do too. Enough information, let’s start baking!!!
