When Yotam Ottolenghi First Fell for Berries
(A nice narrative, and now I'm hungry for some!)
'My relationship with berries follows the same arc as so many relationships: ignorance, discovery, infatuation, growth, complacency and, then, happy coexistence.
Stage 1 — blissful ignorance — sees me growing up thinking that raspberries came in a bottle of an overly sweet cordial that you’d dilute with water and drink after school. It was called mitz pettel (“raspberry juice”) and had never seen a fresh raspberry in its life.
Mine was by no means a fruit-deprived childhood. I grew up in Israel, surrounded by an abundance of the tree-grown sorts: fresh figs, pomegranates, lemons and dates. Apart from a glut of late-winter strawberries, though, fresh forest berries — the small fruits, like raspberries, blackberries and blueberries, born on bushes and low plants — were just not around. The hot Middle Eastern climate didn’t allow it.
Stages 2 and 3 — discovery and infatuation — hit me hard during what I rather grandly called the “European Tour.” The reality was delightfully ungrand: It was 1986 and my best schoolmate and I landed in West Germany, bought two old bikes and proceeded to cycle through the Netherlands and Belgium, to Paris.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/dining/blueberry-recipe-raspberry-ottolenghi.html?
Recipes: Blueberry, Almond and Lemon Cake | Pistachio and Raspberry Tart
