Bilberry
Binomial name -Vaccinium myrtillus
Colloquial names - Blaeberry (Scotland), Fraughan (Ireland), Whortleberry, Hurtleberry, Hurts (Surrey, Cornwall, and Devon), European blueberry, Bilberry, Whimberry/Whinberry.
The most generous bit of land I know is a heathland and woodland a few miles away; it’s where I get spruce tips and green pine cones in the spring, porcini and sweet chestnuts in the autumn, and bilberries and chanterelles in the summer. It’s a well-used bit of land, by mountain bikers and dog walkers and mushroom hunters, but until last week I had never seen anyone else picking bilberries there. It’s not a case of there being a few bushes dotted around here and there, the heathland is carpeted in them. You could spend hours filling bags and bags with bilberries and not make a dent in the amount it has to offer.
I don’t think we make a big enough fuss over bilberries in the UK. They’re delicious, they’re really good for you (famed for their general antioxidant benefits and ability to help the capillary system and eyesight), and where they grow they grow in abundance. We should be having festivals to celebrate them, there should be at least five national desserts featuring them, surely the hills and heaths should be crawling with people picking them at this time of year.
We wouldn’t need to come up with a new festival to celebrate bilberries, just resurrect an old Irish one; Lughnasadh.
In Ireland, fraughans are inextricably linked with the festival of Lughnasadh (31 July/1 August) and celebrations on the last Sunday of July. The general festivities of this time were sometimes transplanted to the nearest Sunday in August and became known as ‘Garland Sunday’ and ‘Fraughan Sunday’. During the festival it was customary for communities to gather on nearby hilltops and lake shores where they partook in many activities, including sporting and picnicking. It was a time for serious courting among teenagers, as is clear from the well-known maxim ‘Many a lad met his wife on Blaeberry Sunday.’ The gathering of fraughans was an established and usual activity for the day and they were often mashed and eaten with sugar and cream. The folklore record also indicates that in Kilkenny it was customary for a young boy to present his girlfriend with the gathered fruit. Once the girl returned home, she made a fraughan cake which was enjoyed by herself and her boyfriend at the bonfire dance on Garland Sunday night. - Ireland's traditional foods : an exploration of Irish local and typical foods and drinks by Cathal Cowan.
If you want to find out if you have bilberries growing near you check this map out on iNaturalist, or this one on the Botanical society’s website. If you’re in the UK you are more likely to be by a patch if you’re in the north or the west but there are pockets in the south east (especially in Surrey where I live). Go pick some, roll around with someone you fancy on the hills (minding the reptiles, and ground nesting birds of course), stain your whole being purple, feast.
A mini bilberry monograph
Description - Low-growing deciduous shrub with oval leaves. Pink, bell-like flowers in late spring and early summer which are replaced by small, round bluish-black berries in late summer. The flesh is dark, unlike American blueberries.
Habitat - Heathland, moorland, mountains, acidic woodland (where conifers grow). You will often find them growing near heather.
Range - Native to most of Europe, and parts of Asia, and North America. For a full list of the areas where it grows look here.
Uses - Used as food, drink, medicine, and dye by humans. Eaten by lots of different animals (look out for purple shit at this time of year in all shapes and sizes where bilberries are found), from insects to bears.
In Sweden, brown bears (Ursus arctos) depend on a nearly continuous intake of berries, especially bilberries (Vaccinium myrtillus) during late summer and early autumn to fatten up prior to hibernation - A human-induced landscape of fear influences foraging behavior of brown bears.
How I use bilberries - I use them the same way I would blueberries, although they are a little tangier (and tastier, in my opinion), so in smoothies and fresh juices and in cakes, pies, and crumbles or turned into jam. To keep eating them even when they’re out of season I freeze as many as I can and dehydrate a bunch too. Once they’re dehydrated I put them in the spice grinder to turn them into a powder that I add to yoghurt or overnight oats.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been obsessed with adding them to madeleines, only because I wanted to experiment with pairing them with different flavours, and madeleines felt like a good vehicle for that experimentation. I tried combining with mugolio and spruce tip honey, meadowsweet, and linden blossom.
Linden blossom was the best, dried and then whizzed in the spice grinder with some lemon zest and cardamom seeds. I stirred that into the madeleine mix and then dropped bilberries into each one once I poured the mix into the tray. I used this recipe as a base.
Fermentation uses - If you pick your own bilberries you may notice that a lot of them have white bloom on them. Like other fruits with white bloom (grapes and sloes for instance) they’re great to harvest wild yeast from. You can make a wild yeast starter (fruit, spring water, and sugar or honey in a jar for a few days. I use the Pascal Baudar 80% water to 20% sugars method) and then make a fermented fruit soda with that.
In my meadowsweet monograph I think I wrote about how my bilberry (& meadowsweet) mead was the best mead I’ve ever made, or drunk. I set some aside and turned it into vinegar, which I am very sad to to say is nearly completely finished.
Besides mead you can also make wine, kombucha, and kefir with it.
Noma have a recipe for lacto-fermented blueberries (which you can use bilberries for) in their book The Noma Guide to Fermentation. 20g of non-iodized salt to 1kg of bilberries. If you have less bilberries make sure your salt is adjusted to be 2% of the weight of the bilberries. They say it takes 4-5 days at 28 degrees celsius, and when it’s ready can be drizzled over ice cream or fresh cheese, or turned into a seasoning paste to be used on corn on the cob or barbecued pork. I had a failed attempt last year that smelled like nail varnish remover, but I am going to try again this year.
Bilberry food and drink uses around the world -
In Russia and Ukraine (where the berries are known as “chernika”) they are used as a filling in pierogi style dumplings called Vareniki/Varenyky. They’re also used as dumpling stuffing in Romania and Poland.
Albanians ferment them into a fruit soda, and Russians add them as a flavouring to the fermented drink Kvass.
In Yorkshire, England they are made into ‘mucky-mouth pies’.
They’re turned into fruit soups in Poland and Sweden (the Swedish bilberry soup is called Blåbärssoppa).
In Finland it’s popular as the filling for a pie called Mustikkapiirakka.
In the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy they are macerated with sugar and water in alcohol to make a fruit liqueur called Mirtillino.
In the 19th century bilberry preserve was served as an accompaniment to mutton in Iceland.
History -
16th century English herbalist John Gerard wrote that there was a drink called Rob sold in apothecaries made from bilberry juice boiled with honey and sugar, used to “mitigate and alay the heate of hot burning agues, stop the belly, stay vomiting and cure the bloody flux proceeding of choler.” Translated into modern English he’s basically saying it will help fevers, and stop diarrhoea, and vomiting, and dysentery.
In world war 2 British pilots ate bilberry jam before going on night missions in the hope that it would improve their night vision.
In 1959 a Ukranian physician called Dr Krivanko wrote to the brother of an American politician he admired, with a suggested cure for the politician’s colon cancer. The doctor wrote that he had cured several cases of “hopeless intestinal cancer” with bilberries; raw, in tea, and in the form of a pudding called ‘kisel’.1
In Soviet era Karelia (NW Russia) you could buy two pairs of tights with one bucket of bilberries.
Science stuff - The constituents of a bilberry are Pectins, Vitamin C, Tannins, Epicatechin, Catechin, Hyperoside, Quercetin-3-glucuronide, Anthocyanins (particularly glycosides of Malvidin, Peonidin, Petunidin, Cyanidin and Delphinidin).
Extracts of the anthocyanins found in bilberry (especially Delphinidin) have been shown to have cancer-fighting potential. There’s also been some promising research carried out on male rats, where bilberry extract inhibited the growth of multiple biomarkers of colon cancer.
Clinical studies have backed up the folk medicine use of bilberries for gastrointestinal issues, showing them to have the potential to protect against gastric ulcers and inhibit the growth of H. pylori.
Bilberries in traditional medicine around the world -
They’re dried and snacked on in Albania and Slovenia to help treat stomach aches. They’re also eaten dried to combat diarrhoea in Russia, Austria, and Lithuania.
They are used to help lower blood sugar in Ukraine, Slovenia, and Georgia.
In Ukraine, Georgia, Russia, and Sápmi various preparations of bilberries are used for general eye health and to improve eyesight.
In Kosovo bilberries are eaten to help with Urethritis.
Fun fact - I found this letter in the CIA FOIA database when researching bilberries a few years ago.
Excellent piece Sarah. So informative and engaging, from specifics to larger bilberry context. Your passion certainly comes through, your writing always makes me realize how much there is to learn. Thank you for sharing.