Meet the thimbleberry, a wild Keweenaw treasure and just about the last truly local flavor of the U.P.
There is a wild berry in the Keweenaw you will never find in a grocery store. It is too soft to ship, almost nobody grows it for sale, and a tiny jar of its jam can cost 15 dollars. Yoopers pay it gladly.
It is called the thimbleberry, and around here it is treated like treasure.
A thimbleberry looks like a soft, flat little raspberry, bright red when ripe. It is intensely flavorful and seriously tart, and it is so delicate that it falls apart almost the moment you pick it. That is the first reason you will never see a tray of them at the store. They simply will not survive the trip.
Thimbleberries grow wild across the cool, northern stretches of the continent, but they have never taken to the farm. The fruit is too soft to harvest in bulk, too fragile to pack, and impossible to ship, so growing it to sell has just never been worth the trouble. A backyard gardener can coax along a plant or two, but you will not find rows of thimbleberries on a farm anywhere.
What the Keweenaw has is a cool, damp, Lake Superior climate the plant loves, thick patches of it along the back roads and trails and out toward the Porcupine Mountains, and a long tradition of turning that wild fruit into jam. This corner of the U.P. is where thimbleberry jam became a beloved local delicacy.
And because it all comes from the wild, every jar is the product of someone’s hard work. The only way to get the berries is to find them growing wild and pick them by hand, one soft little berry at a time, during a short window in late summer. It takes a small mountain of them to fill a single jar. So when you pay for thimbleberry jam, you are paying for the real thing: wild fruit gathered by hand.
Picking and selling it has become a little Keweenaw cottage industry. The Jam Lady has been a fixture up there for over 50 years, and down the road, the Jampot, a humble roadside bakery run by a small community of monks, has been turning local wild berries into prized preserves since the 1980s.
For a lot of Yoopers, especially the ones who have moved away, a jar of thimbleberry jam is not really about breakfast. It is a taste of the Keweenaw you cannot get anywhere else.
So if you are ever up in the Keweenaw in late summer and you spot a roadside sign for thimbleberry jam, do not drive past it. Pay the 15 bucks. You are buying a little jar of one of the last truly wild flavors of the U.P.
Adapted from photo by Krzysztof Ziarnek, Kenraiz, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Featured image credit: Product photo courtesy of The Jam Lady. Used with permission.
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