My Dad’s Blackberry Bag No-Recipe Recipe Is What You Need on Hot Summer Days

I’m not a huge fruit person, but I make an exception for summer berries. I like them juicy, tart and firm, slightly underripe but still with that signature candy-like sweetness berries of all kinds are known for. I love strawberries and raspberries, and I’ll never turn down a bowl of fresh blueberries. But to me, blackberries are and always will be the superior summer berry.

My love of blackberries was instilled in me by my dad one fateful summer day, when the heat of July stood still and stagnant in our suburban cul-de-sac. We lived next to a large, undeveloped field, abutted by other neighborhoods but mostly just shrouded in trees and bushes, most of them unremarkable but some glistening with ripe, juicy blackberries. These bushes held a veritable feast: They would droop with the weight of the fruit, weighed down by their temporary bounty.

On this particular day, my dad had taken me to the overgrown field not to look for fruit but to find insects, our main father-daughter pastime. He would help me capture the bugs in an old pickle jar and let me keep them as “pets” for about an hour until I was instructed to release them back into the wild. But on this particular day while I was searching for beetles, my dad was hunting for something even more exciting than a colorful caterpillar: blackberries.

He had come equipped with a plastic Ziploc bag and began collecting the berries one by one, dropping them into the clear plastic, their soft plops audible in the muggy afternoon air. We ate some of them on the spot, the tartest of the bunch delivering a sharp burst of juice that would make me wrinkle my nose in delight. Others had already been transformed into sweet little candy jewels, the soft bumps of the berries giving under the pressure of my clumsy fingertips.

The real treat had to wait until we got back home, though. The berries at the bottom of the Ziploc bag had already been crushed from the weight of the fruit that rested on top of them by the time we got inside, but Dad continued to mush them up inside the bag until they resembled a pulpy, seedy jam. He cut off a corner of the bag, drinking the sweet, tart juice from the pouch. After showing me how it was done, he indicated that I should try some as well, and I took the same position I would assume years later when I drank from the spigot of a bag of chillable red Franzia in college, my head tilting to get a taste of the fresh crushed jam.

My dad had discovered this culinary delight as a child himself, wandering alone in my grandparents’ neighborhood, collecting the summer berries he found on those long, hot afternoons. He’d crushed the berries by accident, and not wanting the juice to go to waste, found that the Ziploc bag with the cut corner offered the perfect squished berry delivery method. He plucked this memory from his mind like the blackberries from the bush and offered it to me like a keepsake, one just as ephemeral and delicious as the jam itself.

The blackberries that come from the grocery store a block away from my apartment are bigger, juicier, more commercially viable than the blackberries we picked from the bushes that day, but they also have a wateriness to them, a lack of flavor, that just can’t compete with the ripe fruit that came from the empty lot next to my childhood home. Still, sometimes, when I’m missing home, I’ll grab a container from the store, open a Ziploc bag and dump the berries in, squishing them between my fingers before sucking the juice from the cut corner of the bag. The berries may not be quite as good as I remember, but the memory is still just as sweet as it’s ever been.

Dad’s Blackberry Bag Jam Recipe

Ingredients:

½ pound fresh blackberries
Juice of half a lemon (optional)

1. Wash the blackberries, ensuring they’re free of dirt and debris. Place the berries in a gallon Ziploc bag along with the lemon juice, if desired.
2. Crush the berries with your hands, taking care not to break the bag.
3. Cut off the corner of the bag. Drink the jam straight from the bag.

Samantha Maxwell is a food writer and editor based in Boston. Follow her on Twitter at @samseating.