Summertime blues

Hot weather brings blueberry days and blueberry recipes

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Recalling the New England summers of her childhood, food and travel writer Linda Dannenberg says, she thinks of blueberries.

“I can still smell my mother’s lattice-topped blueberry pies cooling on our screened back porch, and taste the plump and tender sugar-topped blueberry muffins that we bought every August morning at Humphreys bakery on Martha’s Vineyard,” she writes.

Years ago, she adds, “We just loved them for themselves — tiny, perfect wash-and-ready fruit with lovely, thin indigo skin, very few seeds, a delicate balance of acidity and sweetness, and dainty, ruffled crowns.”

Dannenberg’s new book, “True Blueberry” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $22.50) is a trove of blueberry lore and background, summarizes her research, and features a variety of recipes, including favorites she collected from chefs and home cooks.

You can find blueberries these days in a wide variety of products, first among them fresh blueberries, both cultivated and wild, she says.

• Wild blueberries, commonly called “low-bush” blueberries because they grow low to the ground in the sandy barrens of New England and eastern Canada, are generally quite small, often no larger than a baby pea, and range in flavor from tangy and sour to exquisitely sweet.

• Cultivated, commercially grown blueberries were developed as hearty hybrids from wild high-bush blueberry plants in the Northeast that were able to thrive in areas where blueberries were not originally grown.

As well as fresh berries, there are air- or heat-dried blueberries, sometimes called dehydrated blueberries, that resemble raisins; freeze-dried berries that are light and crunchy; canned blueberries; and blueberry juice.

Researching and testing recipes for her cookbook, Dannenberg says she discovered blueberries’ versatility, whether used cold, hot, whole and pureed. Her book offers a variety of recipes, for soups and salads, for main-course meat and fish combinations, as well as many traditional sweet dishes and breakfast specialties.