Rubus idaeus (European red raspberry) · R. idaeus subsp. strigosus (American red raspberry) · R. occidentalis (North American black raspberry) · R. coreanus (Korean black raspberry, bokbunja)
Origin: Multiple wild origins across the temperate Northern Hemisphere: the European red raspberry (Rubus idaeus) of Europe and western Asia, the black and red raspberries of North America (R. occidentalis and R. idaeus subsp. strigosus), and the Korean black raspberry (R. coreanus) of East Asia
The raspberry is not one plant but a scattering of closely related brambles gathered independently by peoples across the whole temperate Northern Hemisphere, and the fruit of the modern kitchen is younger, as a cultivated crop, than the potato or the tomato. Botanically it belongs to the genus Rubus, the vast and tangled tribe of brambles that also holds the blackberry, and to the subgenus Idaeobatus, the true raspberries, distinguished from their blackberry cousins by a single elegant trick: the ripe raspberry pulls free of its pale central core, leaving the fruit a hollow thimble of tiny drupelets, whereas the blackberry carries its core away with it. The fruit is not a berry at all in the botanical sense but an aggregate of drupelets, each a miniature stone fruit with its own seed, clustered upon the receptacle like the cells of a honeycomb.
The dominant cultivated raspberry is the European red raspberry, Rubus idaeus, which grows wild across the whole of Europe and western Asia, from the Atlantic seaboard through the forests of Germany and Poland to the Caucasus and Siberia, favouring woodland clearings, the margins of forests, and the disturbed ground of old fires and fellings. It was gathered by the peoples of Europe since the last Ice Age, and its seeds are found in the middens of Neolithic and Roman settlements alike; yet unlike the apple or the grape it was left in the wild for millennia, too fragile, too seedy, and too freely available in the hedgerow to be worth the trouble of the orchard. Only in the sixteenth century did European gardeners begin to cultivate it in earnest, and the first named varieties, red and white, are recorded in the English herbals of the fifteen-hundreds.
Across the Atlantic, quite separately, North America raised its own raspberries. The American red raspberry, R. idaeus subsp. strigosus, is so close to the European plant that the two interbreed freely, and its hardiness would later be bred into the commercial red raspberry to carry it through the North American winter. Beside it grew the black raspberry, Rubus occidentalis, the 'blackcap' of the eastern woodlands, a distinct fruit of deep purple-black colour and a drier, more intense flavour, gathered and dried for the winter by dozens of Indigenous nations long before any European settler arrived. On the far side of the world, in Korea and the mountains of East Asia, a third lineage was tamed: Rubus coreanus, the Korean black raspberry or bokbunja, valued first as a medicine and then as the fruit of one of the most distinctive fruit wines of the peninsula. These separate domestications, European, American, and Korean, are the reason the raspberry has not one homeland but several, and why its story is really three stories that only met in the modern age of horticulture.
The raspberry's travels were, for most of its history, no travels at all: the plant grew wild across three continents and was gathered where it grew, and its extreme perishability, bruising and moulding within a day or two of picking, kept it a local and seasonal pleasure long after hardier fruits had been carried around the world. The classical world knew the wild red raspberry of Europe and Anatolia well enough to give it its lasting name; Pliny the Elder, in the first century CE, called it the fruit of Mount Ida in the Troad, and the Latin Rubus idaeus, 'the bramble of Ida', preserves that attribution to this day. The Roman agriculturalist Palladius, in the fourth century, gives the first hint of deliberate cultivation, but for the whole of the Middle Ages the raspberry remained chiefly a wild fruit of the forest and the monastery physic garden, gathered for its fruit and its leaves alike, the leaf brewed as a medicine long prized by midwives.
Serious cultivation began in the sixteenth century, and it began in the gardens of Northern Europe. English herbalists of the fifteen-hundreds describe the 'raspis' grown red and white in the garden; by the seventeenth century the raspberry had become a settled kitchen-garden fruit across Britain, France, and the German-speaking lands, where the confectioners of Linz set raspberry preserve beneath the lattice of ground-almond pastry to make what may be the oldest named cake in the European record. From these Northern European gardens the raspberry spread outward with the movements of peoples: British settlers carried it to the temperate colonies of the southern hemisphere, where it took to the cool highlands of New Zealand and the hills of Tasmania and Victoria, and European emigrants carried both seed and cuttings to North America, where the imported red raspberry was crossed with the hardy native strigosus to build an industry able to survive the continental winter.
In the modern age the raspberry became, at last, a fruit that could travel. Refrigeration, controlled-atmosphere shipping, and, above all, the deep-freezing of the fruit for jam, juice, and the confectionery trade freed it from the tyranny of its own fragility, and cultivation shifted toward the places whose climate and economics best suited it. The Pacific Northwest of the United States and the neighbouring valleys of British Columbia became the heart of the North American crop; Russia, drawing on the deep folk affection for the wild forest raspberry, remained one of the largest growers of all; and, most remarkably, the small Balkan nation of Serbia, and above all the town of Arilje, turned the raspberry into a national export of such value that Serbs call it 'red gold', supplying a large share of the world's frozen raspberries to the kitchens and factories of Europe. From a fruit too tender to leave its own hedgerow, the raspberry has become one of the most widely traded soft fruits on earth.
The raspberry today is a fruit of two lives. The first is the fresh raspberry of the punnet and the summer garden, still fragile, still fleeting, and still, at its best, one of the most exquisite of all fruits: eaten by the handful, folded into cream, and scattered over the great summer puddings of the European table. The second is the industrial raspberry, picked and instantly frozen or pulped, that underlies a vast trade in jam, juice, coulis, liqueur, yoghurt, and confectionery, and that has made the flavour of raspberry one of the most familiar in the world even to people who have never eaten a fresh one. The commercial crop is overwhelmingly the red raspberry, Rubus idaeus in its many modern cultivars, both the summer-fruiting canes that crop once on the previous year's growth and the autumn-fruiting 'primocane' varieties that fruit on the current season's canes and have greatly lengthened the raspberry year.
Production is concentrated in a handful of temperate regions. Russia and Serbia together account for a very large share of the world crop, the Serbian harvest around Arilje flowing almost entirely into the frozen-fruit trade of Europe; Poland, Mexico, the United States, and Chile are the other great growers, the Pacific Northwest supplying much of the North American processed crop and Mexico and Chile between them keeping fresh raspberries on northern shelves through the winter months. Alongside the red raspberry, the black raspberry (R. occidentalis) survives as a distinct North American speciality, grown in Oregon for its intense flavour and its deep purple juice, and the Korean black raspberry (R. coreanus) is cultivated for bokbunja-ju, the sweet, dark fruit wine that is one of the signature drinks of Korea.
The raspberry sits at the heart of an unusually rich body of regional tradition for so lately cultivated a fruit. It is the fruit of the Scottish summer and of cranachan, the whisky-laced cream, oats, and raspberry pudding of the Highlands; of the English summer pudding, in which the juice of raspberries and other soft fruits soaks scarlet through a case of bread; of the Austrian Linzer torte and the German raspberry spirit Himbeergeist; of the Russian raspberry preserve stirred into tea against the cold; of the Norwegian bringebærgrøt and the French tarte aux framboises and the raspberry coulis that Escoffier poured over his peach Melba. From a wild fruit of three continents, gathered but scarcely grown for the whole of history, the raspberry has become both an everyday industrial flavour and one of the most cherished luxuries of the northern summer.
Historical Journey of Raspberry
Mount Ida & the Wild Woods of Europe and Western Asia — c. 8000 BCE
The European red raspberry, Rubus idaeus, grows wild across the whole temperate breadth of Europe and western Asia, from the Atlantic coasts through the great forests of Central Europe and the Baltic to the Caucasus, the Urals, and Siberia, thriving in woodland clearings, on the margins of forests, and on the disturbed ground left by fire and felling. It has been gathered by the peoples of Europe since the retreat of the last Ice Age; its seeds turn up in Mesolithic and Neolithic settlement layers and in the refuse of Roman camps alike. The classical world knew it well: Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, placed the wild raspberry on Mount Ida in the Troad of Anatolia, and from that attribution the plant takes its enduring botanical name, the 'bramble of Ida'. The Roman agriculturalist Palladius, in the fourth century, gives the earliest hint of its deliberate cultivation. Yet for the whole of antiquity and the Middle Ages the raspberry remained chiefly a wild fruit, gathered from the hedgerow and the forest edge and grown, if at all, in the physic gardens of the monasteries for its fruit and its medicinal leaf. It is from this vast wild population that every cultivated red raspberry of Europe, and ultimately of the world, would be drawn.
Eastern Woodlands, North America — c. 8000 BCE
North America raised its own raspberries, quite independently of Europe, and two of them mattered. The American red raspberry, Rubus idaeus subsp. strigosus, grew across the northern woodlands and was so near a cousin of the European plant that the two would later interbreed freely, its hardiness the gift that would one day let the cultivated red raspberry survive the continental winter. Beside it grew the black raspberry, Rubus occidentalis, the 'blackcap' of the eastern woodlands, a distinct fruit of deep purple-black colour, drier and more intense than the red, ripening in high summer along forest edges and old clearings. For thousands of years the Indigenous nations of the eastern woodlands, amongst them the Haudenosaunee, the Lenape, and the Ojibwe, gathered both raspberries as a treasured wild food: eaten fresh at the height of summer, and, crucially, dried in the sun and pounded into cornmeal breads and puddings or worked into pemmican to carry the fruit's sweetness through the winter. The black raspberry in particular, with its keeping colour and concentrated flavour, held a settled place in the woodland kitchen long before any European reached the coast, and it survives today as a distinctly North American fruit that the Old World never truly took up.
Korean Peninsula & the Mountains of East Asia — c. 1000 BCE
In the hills and mountain woods of the Korean peninsula grows a third, wholly separate raspberry lineage: Rubus coreanus, the Korean black raspberry, called bokbunja. It was valued first as a medicine, its unripe fruit dried and prescribed in the traditional pharmacopoeia of Korea and China as a tonic said to strengthen the kidneys and restore vigour, and the very name bokbunja carries a bawdy folk etymology, the 'overturned chamber-pot berry', from the belief that a man who ate it would pass water with such force as to tip the vessel over. From medicine the fruit passed to the cup. Fully ripened to a deep purple-black and fermented with sugar, bokbunja became the base of bokbunja-ju, a sweet, dark, faintly astringent fruit wine that is one of the most distinctive traditional drinks of Korea, drunk as a restorative and a companion to grilled meat and served at feasts and celebrations. The town of Gochang, in the southwest, remains the heart of its cultivation. Unlike the European and American raspberries, the Korean black raspberry stayed within its own region, a fruit and a wine that the wider world scarcely knows.
Deliberate cultivation of the raspberry began in the gardens of Northern Europe in the sixteenth century, and England was among the first to take it up in earnest. The herbalist William Turner, in his Names of Herbes of 1548, describes the 'raspis' grown in gardens, and by the end of the century red and white raspberries were a settled kitchen-garden fruit across the country, prized for the table, for preserving, and for the raspberry vinegar and cordial of the still-room. Over the following centuries the raspberry became one of the defining soft fruits of the English summer, cropping in the cool, damp climate that suits it far better than the Mediterranean. It gave the English table two of its most characteristic summer preparations: raspberry jam, the deep-red, seed-flecked preserve that fills the sponge cake and the jam tart and remains one of the most beloved of all British preserves; and the summer pudding, that thrifty and glorious dish in which raspberries and other soft fruits are cooked briefly with sugar and their scarlet juice soaked overnight through a lining of white bread, a pudding requiring no oven and no pastry that is, for many, the very taste of the English summer. From the English garden the raspberry would travel outward to the temperate colonies across the world.
In the German-speaking lands the raspberry was cultivated in the kitchen gardens from the later Middle Ages, and its preserve became the heart of one of the most celebrated pastries of Central Europe. The Linzer torte, named for the Austrian city of Linz, sets a thick layer of raspberry (or, further east, redcurrant) jam beneath a lattice of rich pastry made short and fragrant with ground almonds or hazelnuts, cinnamon, and clove; a written recipe for it survives in a Verona manuscript of 1653, which makes the Linzer torte a strong claimant to the title of the oldest cake in the world for which a dated recipe exists. Beyond the pastry kitchen, the German lands turned the raspberry to drink and to spirit: the fruit was distilled into Himbeergeist, the clear, intensely perfumed raspberry eau-de-vie of the Black Forest and the Rhineland, made not by fermenting the fragile fruit but by steeping it in neutral spirit and then distilling, so as to capture the raspberry's fleeting aroma undimmed. The raspberry preserve, the raspberry syrup stirred into sparkling water, and the raspberry spirit together made the fruit a fixture of the German and Austrian table, from the Kaffee und Kuchen of the afternoon to the digestif at the meal's end.
France took the garden raspberry, the framboise, into the heart of its pâtisserie and its confectionery, where it became one of the defining fruits of the sweet kitchen. The clean, tart brightness of the raspberry, set against butter, cream, and sugar, gave the French dessert repertoire some of its most enduring forms: the tarte aux framboises, a crisp sweet pastry shell filled with vanilla crème pâtissière and crowned with a close-set carpet of fresh raspberries glazed to a jewelled shine; the bavarois and the charlotte aux framboises, cold moulded creams set with the fruit's purée; and, above all, the raspberry coulis, the smooth, sieved, uncooked sauce of raspberries, sugar, and a little lemon that is one of the fundamental sauces of French dessert cookery. It was the great chef Auguste Escoffier who gave that coulis its most famous outing, pouring it over poached peaches and vanilla ice cream to create the pêche Melba in honour of the soprano Nellie Melba; the dish is unthinkable without its cold, tart, scarlet raspberry sauce. The French also carried the fruit into liqueur, most famously the deep-black raspberry liqueur Chambord of the Loire, and into the eau-de-vie de framboise of Alsace, cousin to the German Himbeergeist.
No people has held the raspberry in deeper affection than the Russians, for whom the malina of the forest is woven into folk song, proverb, and the memory of childhood summers; to call a place or a life 'ne zhizn', a malina' is to call it sheer bliss. The wild red raspberry grows across the whole of the Russian forest belt, and it was gathered in quantity long before it was ever cultivated, then taken into the dacha gardens as one of the most cherished of all domestic fruits. Its supreme domestic form is malinovoe varenye, the whole-fruit raspberry preserve, cooked gently so that the berries stay whole and suspended in a clear, ruby syrup, and stored in jars against the long winter. This preserve is far more than a jam: it is the classic Russian remedy for a cold and a fever, a spoonful stirred into hot tea to be drunk in bed, and it is the very soul of the Russian tea table, where a dish of varenye is set beside the samovar and eaten by the spoonful with, or dissolved into, glass after glass of strong tea. The raspberry preserve, the raspberry cordial, and the raspberry-leaf infusion together make the fruit one of the most beloved and most medicinal in the Russian household.
In the Nordic countries the raspberry, bringebær to the Norwegians and hallon to the Swedes, is one of the great fruits of the brief, intense northern summer, gathered wild from the forest and the mountainside in July and August and grown in every garden and allotment. The short season and the long memory of scarcity made the Nordic kitchen a master of preserving and of the simple fruit pudding, and the raspberry's supreme Nordic form is the fruit grøt: bringebærgrøt, a soft, glowing compote of raspberries cooked briefly with sugar and thickened, in the Scandinavian manner, with potato flour to a glossy, spoonable set, served cool with a pour of cold milk or single cream. The raspberry is folded, too, into the whipped-cream and berry desserts of the summer table, layered into the trifle-like cream puddings, cooked down into the thin raspberry cordial (bringebærsaft) drunk diluted with water through the warm months, and set beside cloudberry and bilberry as one of the wild treasures that the whole of the North goes to the woods to gather. In a cuisine that prizes clarity and restraint, the raspberry's clean tartness is exactly to the Nordic taste.
Blairgowrie & the Carse of Gowrie, Scotland — c. 1890 CE
Scotland made the raspberry its own to a degree no other nation matched, and for much of the twentieth century the fertile, well-drained fields of Perthshire and Angus, around the little town of Blairgowrie and along the Carse of Gowrie, were the greatest raspberry-growing district in the world. The cool, long summer days and soft rainfall of eastern Scotland suit the cane to perfection, giving a fruit of exceptional flavour, and from the eighteen-nineties onward the Scottish crop supplied the jam factories of Dundee and the fresh markets of Britain, picked each summer by armies of travelling and holiday workers in a harvest that became a fixture of the Scottish year. The raspberry is the fruit of the Scottish summer, and its national dish is cranachan: toasted pinhead oatmeal, whisky, and heather honey folded through softly whipped cream and layered with fresh raspberries, a pudding that gathers the raspberry, the oat, the whisky, and the honey of Scotland into a single glass. Once a harvest-home celebration of the first cream and the ripe fruit, cranachan is now the Scottish dessert served at Burns suppers and St Andrew's night, and the clearest expression of the raspberry's place at the centre of the Scottish table.
Oregon, Washington & the Pacific Northwest — c. 1920 CE
The cool, moist maritime climate of the Pacific Northwest, from the Willamette Valley of Oregon through western Washington and into the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, proved ideal for the raspberry, and over the twentieth century the region became the heart of the North American crop. The industry drew on both raspberry lineages of the continent: the hardy native red raspberry of North America, crossed with the finer-flavoured European Rubus idaeus to build cultivars that combined winter-hardiness with quality, and the native black raspberry, R. occidentalis, grown as a distinct crop for its deep colour and concentrated flavour. Much of the harvest flows into the processed trade, individually quick-frozen or pulped for jam, juice, and the confectionery and dairy industries, but the region's cooks also gave the fresh fruit two enduring American forms. The raspberry pie, a deep double-crust or lattice pie of fresh raspberries thickened with a little starch and eaten warm with cream or vanilla ice cream, is the summer pie of the Northwest; and black raspberry ice cream, made from the intense purple juice of the native blackcap, is one of the most distinctive regional ice-cream flavours in the United States, a taste of high summer in Oregon.
British settlers carried the raspberry to the temperate colonies of the southern hemisphere, and it took especially well to the cool climate of New Zealand, where it became a settled fruit of the home garden and the market from the later nineteenth century and a small commercial crop in the South Island. Grafted onto the British baking tradition the settlers brought with them, the raspberry became one of the defining fruits of the antipodean home-baking culture, that deep tradition of the tin, the tray, and the church fête in which raspberry jam is a constant. Its most distinctive New Zealand expression is the Louise cake, a baking-tin classic in which a thin shortcake base is spread with raspberry jam and topped with a soft coconut meringue, then baked and cut into squares: the sharp, fruity jam is the essential counterpoint to the sweet coconut meringue above, and the cake is a fixture of the New Zealand tea table and the country baking repertoire. Through such dishes, and through the raspberry-jam sponge and the raspberry-topped pavlova of the summer table, the fruit became part of the shared home-baking inheritance of New Zealand.
In the later twentieth century the raspberry became, of all things, a pillar of the Serbian economy, and the Serbs came to call the fruit 'red gold'. The hilly country of western and central Serbia, above all around the town of Arilje and through the Šumadija, proved outstandingly suited to the cane, and Serbia rose to become one of the largest raspberry producers on earth and for a time the single greatest exporter of frozen raspberries in the world, its harvest flowing into the jam, juice, and confectionery factories of Western Europe. The raspberry is a matter of national pride and a mainstay of the rural economy, picked each summer by whole families and villages. Within the Serbian home the fruit is turned into slatko od maline, the whole-fruit spoon preserve offered to guests, and above all into sok od maline, the deep-red raspberry cordial or syrup boiled down with sugar and a little citric acid and kept through the year to be diluted with cold water as the beloved soft drink of the Serbian summer, the taste of childhood and of hospitality across the country. From a wild fruit of the Balkan hills, the raspberry became both a national livelihood and a national drink.
To explore — select an ingredient below · click any location dot on the map for recipes and stories · browse the information panel on the right · trace the full journey on the timeline.
Journey Point Map Key
Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
c. 1980 CEArilje & the Šumadija, Serbia
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1980 CE
8000 BCE1653 CE1890 CE1980 CE
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Raspberry
Rubus idaeus (European red raspberry) · R. idaeus subsp. strigosus (American red raspberry) · R. occidentalis (North American black raspberry) · R. coreanus (Korean black raspberry, bokbunja)
FruitsRosaceae (Rose family): aggregate fruit of drupelets borne on a receptacle
🌍Origin
Multiple wild origins across the temperate Northern Hemisphere: the European red raspberry (Rubus idaeus) of Europe and western Asia, the black and red raspberries of North America (R. occidentalis and R. idaeus subsp. strigosus), and the Korean black raspberry (R. coreanus) of East Asia — gathered wild since the Palaeolithic; first cultivated in Europe c. 1548 CE
🌱Domestication
The raspberry is not one plant but a scattering of closely related brambles gathered independently by peoples across the whole temperate Northern Hemisphere, and the fruit of the modern kitchen is younger, as a cultivated crop, than the potato or the tomato. Botanically it belongs to the genus Rubus, the vast and tangled tribe of brambles that also holds the blackberry, and to the subgenus Idaeobatus, the true raspberries, distinguished from their blackberry cousins by a single elegant trick: the ripe raspberry pulls free of its pale central core, leaving the fruit a hollow thimble of tiny drupelets, whereas the blackberry carries its core away with it. The fruit is not a berry at all in the botanical sense but an aggregate of drupelets, each a miniature stone fruit with its own seed, clustered upon the receptacle like the cells of a honeycomb.
The dominant cultivated raspberry is the European red raspberry, Rubus idaeus, which grows wild across the whole of Europe and western Asia, from the Atlantic seaboard through the forests of Germany and Poland to the Caucasus and Siberia, favouring woodland clearings, the margins of forests, and the disturbed ground of old fires and fellings. It was gathered by the peoples of Europe since the last Ice Age, and its seeds are found in the middens of Neolithic and Roman settlements alike; yet unlike the apple or the grape it was left in the wild for millennia, too fragile, too seedy, and too freely available in the hedgerow to be worth the trouble of the orchard. Only in the sixteenth century did European gardeners begin to cultivate it in earnest, and the first named varieties, red and white, are recorded in the English herbals of the fifteen-hundreds.
Across the Atlantic, quite separately, North America raised its own raspberries. The American red raspberry, R. idaeus subsp. strigosus, is so close to the European plant that the two interbreed freely, and its hardiness would later be bred into the commercial red raspberry to carry it through the North American winter. Beside it grew the black raspberry, Rubus occidentalis, the 'blackcap' of the eastern woodlands, a distinct fruit of deep purple-black colour and a drier, more intense flavour, gathered and dried for the winter by dozens of Indigenous nations long before any European settler arrived. On the far side of the world, in Korea and the mountains of East Asia, a third lineage was tamed: Rubus coreanus, the Korean black raspberry or bokbunja, valued first as a medicine and then as the fruit of one of the most distinctive fruit wines of the peninsula. These separate domestications, European, American, and Korean, are the reason the raspberry has not one homeland but several, and why its story is really three stories that only met in the modern age of horticulture.
⛵Global Voyage
The raspberry's travels were, for most of its history, no travels at all: the plant grew wild across three continents and was gathered where it grew, and its extreme perishability, bruising and moulding within a day or two of picking, kept it a local and seasonal pleasure long after hardier fruits had been carried around the world. The classical world knew the wild red raspberry of Europe and Anatolia well enough to give it its lasting name; Pliny the Elder, in the first century CE, called it the fruit of Mount Ida in the Troad, and the Latin Rubus idaeus, 'the bramble of Ida', preserves that attribution to this day. The Roman agriculturalist Palladius, in the fourth century, gives the first hint of deliberate cultivation, but for the whole of the Middle Ages the raspberry remained chiefly a wild fruit of the forest and the monastery physic garden, gathered for its fruit and its leaves alike, the leaf brewed as a medicine long prized by midwives.
Serious cultivation began in the sixteenth century, and it began in the gardens of Northern Europe. English herbalists of the fifteen-hundreds describe the 'raspis' grown red and white in the garden; by the seventeenth century the raspberry had become a settled kitchen-garden fruit across Britain, France, and the German-speaking lands, where the confectioners of Linz set raspberry preserve beneath the lattice of ground-almond pastry to make what may be the oldest named cake in the European record. From these Northern European gardens the raspberry spread outward with the movements of peoples: British settlers carried it to the temperate colonies of the southern hemisphere, where it took to the cool highlands of New Zealand and the hills of Tasmania and Victoria, and European emigrants carried both seed and cuttings to North America, where the imported red raspberry was crossed with the hardy native strigosus to build an industry able to survive the continental winter.
In the modern age the raspberry became, at last, a fruit that could travel. Refrigeration, controlled-atmosphere shipping, and, above all, the deep-freezing of the fruit for jam, juice, and the confectionery trade freed it from the tyranny of its own fragility, and cultivation shifted toward the places whose climate and economics best suited it. The Pacific Northwest of the United States and the neighbouring valleys of British Columbia became the heart of the North American crop; Russia, drawing on the deep folk affection for the wild forest raspberry, remained one of the largest growers of all; and, most remarkably, the small Balkan nation of Serbia, and above all the town of Arilje, turned the raspberry into a national export of such value that Serbs call it 'red gold', supplying a large share of the world's frozen raspberries to the kitchens and factories of Europe. From a fruit too tender to leave its own hedgerow, the raspberry has become one of the most widely traded soft fruits on earth.
🍽Modern Culinary Role
The raspberry today is a fruit of two lives. The first is the fresh raspberry of the punnet and the summer garden, still fragile, still fleeting, and still, at its best, one of the most exquisite of all fruits: eaten by the handful, folded into cream, and scattered over the great summer puddings of the European table. The second is the industrial raspberry, picked and instantly frozen or pulped, that underlies a vast trade in jam, juice, coulis, liqueur, yoghurt, and confectionery, and that has made the flavour of raspberry one of the most familiar in the world even to people who have never eaten a fresh one. The commercial crop is overwhelmingly the red raspberry, Rubus idaeus in its many modern cultivars, both the summer-fruiting canes that crop once on the previous year's growth and the autumn-fruiting 'primocane' varieties that fruit on the current season's canes and have greatly lengthened the raspberry year.
Production is concentrated in a handful of temperate regions. Russia and Serbia together account for a very large share of the world crop, the Serbian harvest around Arilje flowing almost entirely into the frozen-fruit trade of Europe; Poland, Mexico, the United States, and Chile are the other great growers, the Pacific Northwest supplying much of the North American processed crop and Mexico and Chile between them keeping fresh raspberries on northern shelves through the winter months. Alongside the red raspberry, the black raspberry (R. occidentalis) survives as a distinct North American speciality, grown in Oregon for its intense flavour and its deep purple juice, and the Korean black raspberry (R. coreanus) is cultivated for bokbunja-ju, the sweet, dark fruit wine that is one of the signature drinks of Korea.
The raspberry sits at the heart of an unusually rich body of regional tradition for so lately cultivated a fruit. It is the fruit of the Scottish summer and of cranachan, the whisky-laced cream, oats, and raspberry pudding of the Highlands; of the English summer pudding, in which the juice of raspberries and other soft fruits soaks scarlet through a case of bread; of the Austrian Linzer torte and the German raspberry spirit Himbeergeist; of the Russian raspberry preserve stirred into tea against the cold; of the Norwegian bringebærgrøt and the French tarte aux framboises and the raspberry coulis that Escoffier poured over his peach Melba. From a wild fruit of three continents, gathered but scarcely grown for the whole of history, the raspberry has become both an everyday industrial flavour and one of the most cherished luxuries of the northern summer.
