Blue Food

I’ve been picking a lot of blueberries. We have a bumper crop this year, thanks to CSB’s excellent pruning and the bees’ pollination. It is more or less impossible to pick all the blueberries out there, but I will keep trying, and encourage my friends to come and help.

Years ago I read in a book by J.K. Huysman – whom I imagine to have been a very decadent libertine of the 19th French variety, except for the odd fact that he wrote THE biography of Saint Lydwin of Schiedam, the 12th century Dutch mystic, visionary and mistress of self-mortification, also an anorexic of sorts: for 19 years she survived on the Eucharist alone – called Against the Grain in which he described an entirely black meal. Caviar, squid, truffles and who knows what else were served on black china in a black lacquered room by naked Negresses, and so forth. *

That inspired me to create color themed meals.

I’ve done pretty well with red and green, even orange. But blue has been challenging.

Blue food is good for you. (Think antioxidant.)

There is never enough blue food.

It is (thus far, in my efforts) impossible to serve an entire meal of blue food. (Obviously, food coloring is not allowed, ever.)
Eggplants (Aubergines) are purple and can be used as being legitimately on the blue spectrum. But that pretty much exhausts the world’s supply of blue food.
I would love to learn of some other blue foods out there.

Another blueberry fact you may like to know: blueberries are among the three, ONLY THREE, fruits native to North America. The other two are cranberries and concord grapes. I don’t know where I learned this, but I sincerely believe it to be a FACT.

* It was many years ago when I read this book and it is entirely possible that I have seriously misremembered the black meal episode. It is entirely possible that I have made up either the whole thing or significant parts of it.