If you
were a bear, living in our desert, you might eat prickly pears right off the
plant... carefully, as Baloo taught Mowgli in Disney's The Jungle Book.
Baloo
sings:
Now
when you pick a pawpaw
Or a
prickly pear
And you
prick a raw paw
Well,
next time beware
Don't
pick the prickly pear by the paw
When you
pick a pear try to use the claw
But you
don't need to use the claw
When you
pick a pear of the big pawpaw
Have I
given you a clue?
Kipling
didn’t
actually write about the prickly pear in his 1894 book, The Jungle Book, on
which the fanciful movie was based (at least I couldn't find anything...).
However,
T.S. Eliot did write about the prickly pear in his work, The Hollow Men. In section three he writes of being in a "dead land" and a "cactus
land." Section five begins:
Here
we go round the prickly pear
Prickly
pear prickly pear
Here we
go round the prickly pear
At five
o'clock in the morning.
Five
o'clock seems early for going round anything but, in reality, it is sage
advice. Here in the Sonoran Desert, prickly pears ripen in mid-to-late summer
when temperatures are warm even in the early morning hours.
Juan
Olivarez seems to say it best, and most succinctly, in his 17-syllable haiku:
Prickly
pear cactus,
Yellow
blossoms in the wild.
Beauty,
shelter, food.
Last
weekend, I went out early - maybe not at 5:00 in the morning - and picked about
3 pounds of prickly pears in our neighborhood. There are so many that I barely
made a dent in the harvest, leaving plenty for the coyotes, javelinas, rabbits,
or whatever might eat them... I doubt we have any bears at our low altitude.
The
blossom of the prickly pear is gorgeous, and its fruits are quite beautiful,
too. Yet, devoid of either, the plants themselves are fascinating botanical
architecture. When Olivarez refers to them as shelter, I think of the many
critters than live among and below them, and, among them, try not to envision
the rattlesnakes.
Warning:
Prickly pear fruits do hurt if you touch them. Some parts hurt a lot, like its
big thorns, and other parts hurt a little and annoy more, like the seemingly
innocuous hair-like glochids on each fruit.
Not having Baloo's claws, I use
tongs to harvest them, putting them in a paper bag that I can throw away. Some
people take a creosote branch to brush away some of the glochids first, but by
using tongs I find that unnecessary.
Each
pound of ripe fruit yields a little less than 1 cup of juice. When is a fruit
ripe? When it is tugged from the plant, it comes off easily and the base of the
fruit oozes deep purple-pink juice. If it is green - or even light pink - it
isn't ripe.
When I
first saw prickly pear lemonade, syrup, or jelly, I thought it must be the most
chemically produced substance on earth. There was no way such a color could be
natural.
Well,
guess what? I was wrong. It is natural, and it is very tasty. Today, I am
making jelly. Maybe I will make some syrup this summer, too, as it is good over
pancakes. And the juice is great in prickly pear margaritas!
~ David
Prickly
Pear Jelly
3 1/2
pounds prickly pear fruit, to yield 3 cups juice
1/2 cup
strained freshly squeezed lemon juice
1.75
ounces powdered pectin
5 cups
sugar
To
extract the juice from the fruit, the easiest and (literally) painless way to
do it, is to freeze the fruit for several days. First wash the fruit in running
water then, using tongs,place in
a stainless steel bowl and place in freezer for at least two days.
The day
before you plan to make the jelly, remove the fruit and place it in a
cloth-lined colander and let it thaw. Set the colander in a glass, ceramic, or
stainless steel bowl to catch the juice. Once thawed, the fruit will break down
and you can press on the solids with the back of a stainless steel spoon to
extract the juice. To speed the process, you can gather the ends of the fabric
together and, using rubber gloves to avoid the glochids, squeeze all the juice
from the fruit. You will need three cups of juice for the recipe.
In a
large pot, mix 3 cups prickly pear juice, 1/2 cup strained lemon juice, and the
pectin; bring to a rapid boil, stirring constantly. Add in the sugar and
continue stirring until it returns to a boil that cannot be stirred down. Boil
hard for 4 minutes, stirring to keep it from boiling over, then pour into
sterilized jars and seal with sterilized lids.
Process
in boiling water for 10 minutes. Let cool. If lids don't "pop," keep
jelly refrigerated; no "pop" indicates an incomplete seal. Makes about 7 half pints.
