Kate Lebo - The Book of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly (with recipes)

Aronia melanocarpa

Rosaceae (rose) family

Also known as chokeberry, black chokeberry, barrenberry, chokepear

Aronia berries taste vegetal like a grass stem, then sour like a crabapple, with a tannic pucker that rivals raw quince and deep-purple juice that stains teeth like wine. Aronias folk namein many places still the name theyre best known byis black chokeberry, earned by what you do when you eat them.

Member of the rose family and native to the Eastern half of the United States and Canada, aronia grows wild in good or poor soil, in meadows or bogs or roadsides or the edges of oceans and lakes, a cold-climate bush that loves full sun. It has been farmed in Eastern Europe and Russia for wine making, food coloring, and dessert flavoring since the mid-twentieth century, but only recently have American consumers shown any interest. Today, the co-ops and health-food stores where aronia might be found usually sell it as superfruit: natures medicine, chewable by the handful if you can stand the taste.

Aronia berries are high in polyphenols, the phytochemicals with antioxidant properties advertised to prevent cancer and banish wrinkles, allowing us to imagine an invisible serum that can slake, slough, or soothe the rust from our oxidizing, time-sensitive bodies. Anthocyanins give the berries their deep color and antioxidant load, while tannins contribute a dry, overpowering taste so strong that most people cut aronia berries with milder fruit to choke them down. Tannins often accompany anthocyanins, which means darker fruit tends to be more astringent. To get the most nutritional benefit, take aronia straight. The operative rule here, as it was in my childhood home: the worse it tastes, the healthier it must be.

My mothers best scheme to convert me to her health rituals is a fruit smoothie. She starts with leafy greens in a blender, pours hot ginger tea over the greens to cook them slightly, then adds blueberries, two tablespoons of ground flax, and a banana, and blends until liquefied. The blender we use to make this drink shares the name of the hope we place in drinking it: Magic Bullet, or something that cures or remedies without harmful side effects. I often confuse magic bullets with silver ones, which do something elsekill mercurial monsters efficiently.

Lately, Ive replaced the blueberries in my mothers recipe with aronia berries. I would believe they are three to four times healthier than blues even if their packaging didnt say so, because they immediately assert their potency: they stain everything they touch with a deep purple thats not like blood but reminds me of it. When I smash an aronia berry between my thumb and the kitchen counter, I make ink that doubles as a nutritional supplement.