Travel with Angela Lansbury: New Taste - Hawthorn Berries From China

Hawthorn berries bought from Fairprice supermarket in Bukit Panjang, Singapore. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

I am always on the lookout for new foods and drinks to try. In a supermarket called Fairprice in Singapore I was looking for reasonably priced in season fruit when I saw Hawthorn Berries.

My first thought was that they could be eaten raw, like strawberries, and I bought them. A handy snack. A new experience.

When I got them back home, I opened the pack eagerly. I felt them. They were rock hard!

What were you supposed to do with them? I hunted all over the internet. No help. They could be used in jams. But the seeds were poisonous, like apple seeds. (All these years and nobody told me that. fortunately I always remove apple pips when cooking apples, ainly to get rid of the sharp bits in the core.

Anyway, back to the hawthorn berries. I belong to a Whatsapp group called cooking and gardening in Singapore. They didn't know anything. My family in London reckoned that you could probably cook them in boiling water with sugar.

I appealed on the supermarket page in Facebook. No answer as of yet.

I finally decided that I was not going to return them, nor throw them away. I would have to cook them.

I prepared with a smallish non-stick saucepan. I washed the fruit.

Now what? Remove the seeds.

I gingerly cut open one of the small fruits. To my amazement, it was soft, easy to cut. The skin was taut but thin, like the skin of an unripe apple or pear.

What of the seeds. Inside were not a cluster of pips like in an apple. Nor a lot of seeds like a berry, or passion fruit. Instead the centre had one large stone - like a cherry.

Hawthorn berries cut. Photo by Angela Lansbury. copyright.

I gingerly cut off a slice with a sharp fruit knife. Easy to cut. Not hard at all. I looked, and tasted. The inside was soft, like a ripe avocado, like an old apple. But, disappointingly. Very little flavour.

Was it safe to eat the skin? What would the skin taste like? I ate the skin. The tiny, sharp pieces but in the back of my throat and made me choke. Be careful to bite and chew before swallowing. What if I were allergic to it?

After that I lost interest for an hour or so. Until I felt hungry again.

I tried again. This time I decided to gnaw with my teeth. A surprising difference. More flavour.

However, more risk of grinding off the surface of my teeth.

I went back online, this time with more success. I added the word China. Up popped a website about make juice and eating the berries.

The juice can be made by cooking the berries with rock sugar, or, if that is not available, with granulated sugar.

First, the Chinese cook washes them with salt. Hm.

Now I am wondering whether a plant will grow if I plant the seed.

Useful Websites

https://omnivorescookbook.com/recipes/hawthorn-berry-juice

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See Update added Saturday Oct 14th.

Dried Hawthorn Slices