Wild Berries Take the Bite Out of Big Apple’s Hot Summer

NEW YORK--One of the best things about this sweltering city in the summertime is its legendary Greenmarket in Union Square.

The market is an urban oasis of greenery, flowers and exquisite produce, a social center for the food community and, of course, the best source for local fruit and vegetables, often grown to meet the demands of top chefs.

The Greenmarket is also an easy way for the tourist to dip into the life of the city--an experience that is far more real than, say, a trip to Times Square and sometimes, more entertaining.

The Greenmarket, the first and largest of New York City’s farmers markets, bustles with chefs, food writers and produce obsessives, who trade gossip while hunting for unusual heirloom tomatoes or sniffing fragrant Charentais melons. The scene is at its best early mornings, especially on Wednesday and Saturday, when the market is at its largest.

David Bouley may roar up on his motorcycle to pick up a flat of delicate wild strawberries, while office workers, students and tourists throng the 50-odd stands next to the park at Union Square, just north of Greenwich Village, in a thriving area that the market itself helped make popular.

Over the course of a year, the big California markets may offer a greater diversity of produce, but the midsummer Greenmarket features a number of intriguing items rarely available back home.

Last Friday, for example, there were maroon gooseberries with an intensely sweet-tart flavor, splendid black raspberries and bright red Montmorency tart cherries, the traditional kind for making pies and jams.

Franca Tantillo of Berried Treasures brought her first picking of wild blueberries, tiny, fragile fruits laboriously gathered from a meadow in the Catskill Mountains.

Most were from 6-foot-tall high-bush plants, the ancestors of modern cultivated blueberries, and had a complex, tangy, wild taste, irresistibly intense and purifying to the palate. They sold quickly--no wonder.

Tantillo also had wild low-bush blueberries, from plants less than a foot tall. These fruits are lighter in color because their whitish bloom doesn’t rub off as easily. And they’re sweeter but milder in flavor. Because of the backbreaking labor involved in handpicking, fresh low-bush blueberries are rare except in Maine and Canada, where there are denser stands and a substantial commercial crop is harvested with rakes for freezing and processing.

But there’s good news too--especially for those curious for a taste but living on the opposite coast.

For several weeks starting in early August, Sunrise County Wild Blueberry Assn. in Cherryfield, Maine, will sell a 10-pound flat of fresh wild low-bush blueberries for $21.10 plus shipping, which is about $35 for second-day delivery. (For information, call (207) 497-2846; or e-mail wreathworks @nemaine.com.)

On Friday, Peter Hoffman, chef and owner of Savoy Restaurant in SoHo, stopped by to sample Tantillo’s celebrated Tristar strawberries, a small, tender and flavorful variety, with much of the exquisite aroma of wild strawberries. There’s nothing like them for making a shortcake, Hoffman said, because they render juice when cut, whereas most modern berries have been selected for a firmer, drier texture.

In California the Tristar’s closest relative is the Seascape, which is offered by market stands such Harry’s Berries.

Across the way, there was Ted Blew’s hot pepper stand. Blew grows an astounding 300 varieties in New Jersey and will offer a mind-boggling array by mid-August, from aromatic Peruvian Aji Puca-Uchus to foot-long Hot Portugal Sizzlers.

But even in July, his blazing display made the concrete canyons of New York seem far away.

Union Square Greenmarket, 17th Street and Broadway, New York City, Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. (Tantillo sells on Friday only; Blew sells on Friday and Saturday).