Have you ever heard of blue raspberries, bushberries or champagne grapes?  Well, they all exist, but they’re all fake in some way or another.  They are also all delicious.  In fact, just the other day, at Market Hall, I bought all of them.

I saw berries that I did not recognize.  Their taste was most similar to an odd berry that would grow long, to about the size of a child’s finger, that I found in India, but only in one specific spot outside of the town of Rishikesh; it was sold at a relatively exorbitant price.  These ones at Maket Hall Produce were labelled as bushberries, grown in California, though the receipt listed them as black raspberries.

I did some research and found that bushberry is basically an overarching term for any berries that grow on bushes like raspberries, blackberries, thimbleberries, etc.  So they were bushberries, but what kind?   Black raspberries taste nothing like raspberries or blackberries, which fit this case, but they don’t grow in California.  Finally, I pinpointed the taste, like something between grape gummy candies and artificial blue raspberry flavoring.  Further research indicates that they are blue raspberries, also known as blackcap or whitebark raspberries or, confusingly, sometimes also called black raspberries.  They are delicious and should be tried.  I never knew that blue raspberries were real, and am even more surprised that the artificial flavoring is a decent approximation of the real thing.

The other “fake” fruit I bought that day was a pint of “champagne grapes.”  They’re little tiny, seedless, purple grapes on small-stemmed, tight, but large clusters.  They are nothing like real Champagne grapes, which are primarily pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay.  Though they are a bit more difficult to eat than large grapes and not nearly as pleasing to bit into, but the taste is worth it.  This was the final of my fake fruit quandaries; they are called “champagne grapes” as nothing more than a disingenuous marketing tool.  They are actually an ancient Greek cultivar, known as Black Corinth.

Posted under Ingredients