Making lingonberry jam in Sweden - picking and eating the 'red gold of the forests'

In 'The Scandinavian Kitchen' by Camilla Plum, berries get a whole chapter of their own; they are the star ingredient in a host of mouthwatering, jewel-coloured dishes which demonstrate the importance of berries in northern European cooking. I love trying to understand a culture by exploring its food, so it was wonderful to discover fruiting lingonberry bushes on a walk in the forest in southern Sweden last week while on honeymoon. The berries were almost too easy to pick, tumbling off the bushes so readily we often had to recover them from the moss below.

Lingonberries (also known as cowberries) are in the same genus as the cranberry (Vaccinium) and grow in similar peatland conditions. They don't make for very good eating when raw and unsweetened but when made into jam they are very versatile and can be eaten with meat, with fish or with dessert. The berries contain a high level of benzoic acid, a natural preservative, so they keep extremely well, and they are also high in anti-oxidants and vitamins.

We picked several handfuls of berries (only a small amount in jam-making terms) and followed Camilla's straightforward recipe for raw lingonberry jam, maximising the flavour and beneficial nutrients which would be lost if the berries were cooked. I simply added an equal amount of sugar to the berries, mashed them a little and stirred several times a day until the sugar had dissolved. 

I think I used slightly too much sugar (I was without weighing scales in a self-catering cabin and measured by volume rather than by weight) and so it took about five days to dissolve, producing a jam sweeter than I would have liked, with only a hint of the lingonberry bitterness, but we ate some with our elk steaks and it was a very good match for the flavour of the meat.

We brought the rest of the jam home in our suitcase (hence the intention of making only a small quantity) and intend to keep it until Christmas, to use as an alternative cranberry sauce perhaps!