Arctostaphylos uva-ursi

Bearberry

Arctostaphylos uva-ursi is best known as a medicinal herb, especially good for urinary tract infections. But it also has edible berries, called Bearberry in English. The botanical name comes from the word for Bearberry in Greek (Arctostaphylos) and Latin (uva ursi). It is also known as Kinnikinnick in some American Indian languages.

The plant is a very low growing shrub, often hugging rocks, and only getting about 6 inches tall. The leaves are fairly tough (like manzanita, a closely related plant), 1-2 inches long, and obovate in shape, which means they are pointed at the stem end, and round at the far end. In the fall, the small bright red berries will be ripe. In my region, these plants are only found at high altitudes, but farther north they are more common and can be found in Canada and Alaska. The berries are ripe in the fall when other better-tasting berries are well past their season and no longer available.

When raw, the berries are somewhat dry, have a mealy texture, and not much flavor. The become sweeter when cooked, either boiled in water or cooked with grease. The water-boiled ones are somewhat sweet, and juicier from the water, but still have a mealy texture. The ones I fried in grease were similarly sweetish, and had less of the mealy texture, but the flesh inside had shrunk during the cooking. The best flavor seems to come from cooking in oil and pounding or grinding into a coarse powder. The pounding helps break up the seeds. They are still not good tasting enough that I would want to eat it very often.

Many tribes of the American Indians ate the berries for food in various ways. Moerman's "Native American Ethnobotany" has an unusually detailed recipe:

Fruit cooked in grease, pounded, mixed with raw fish eggs, and eaten. Approximate proportions of the ingredients were 1 tablespoon grease, 1½ cups fruit, and 2 tablespoons whitefish [or salmon] eggs separated from the adhering membrane. A little sugar was added for flavor. After the fruits were lightly cooked in grease, they were pounded until they were crumbly. They were then placed in a heavy cloth folded to make a sack and pounded with the back of an ax head. The fish eggs moistened the pounded fruit.

I tried preparing the fruit according to this recipe, except that I used a coffee grinder to grind the fruit to a powder, cooked it in a small amount of grease, then used tomato guts instead of fish eggs to moisten it. I didn't have fish eggs, but I thought the insides of a tomato would have a similar texture. When prepared this way, the flavor is fairly good. It has a good sweetness from both the bearberry and the tomato, though it is hard to find a flavor to compare it to. It has the texture of coarse gruel along with a few hard bits of seed that the grinder wasn't able to pulverize completely. This method of preparation is much more palatable than my previous attempts.