I am always surprised at how many people have never tasted, picked, or – most surprisingly- heard of huckleberries. With the culture that surrounds the little fruit in our part of the world, it’s easy to forget that it is, in fact, secluded to this part of the world.
Huckleberries are difficult to explain to and are far too often too closely compared to a blueberry. Frankly, I think huckleberries stand alone in the fruit world. Though someone did once describe it to me as a blueberry on steroids which I think is a fairly accurate description. Or fireworks on your tongue…
In light of the upcoming Huckleberry Festival at Schweitzer (Sunday, Aug. 2) I wanted to highlight some random, fun, albeit sort of useless tidbits and pieces of history about the huckleberry…
Below are excerpts from a couple of different online huckleberry sources…. Enjoy!
- Early European settlers named them “hurtleberry,” whose origin is unknown (though some say it has something to do with hurt, from the bruised color of the berries; a related British dialect form is whortleberry).
- Very early on — at the latest 1670 — this was corrupted to huckleberry.
- As huckleberries are small, dark and rather insignificant, in the early part of the nineteenth century the word became a synonym for something humble or minor, or a tiny amount:
“He was within a huckleberry of being smothered to death”.
- Later on it came to mean somebody inconsequential:
Mark Twain’s character Huckleberry Finn, was so named, as he told an interviewer
in 1895, to establish that he was a boy “of lower extraction or degree” than Tom
Sawyer.
- “I’m your huckleberry” — is to be just the right person for a given job, or a willing executor of some commission. Where it comes from needs a bit more explaining.
- “My huckleberry friend” – It seems that the word came to be given as a mark of affection or comradeship to one’s partner or sidekick.
- “The Huckleberry Railroad” was so named because it ran so slow; a person could jump off the train, pick huckleberries and jump back on the train with minimum effort.”
I think most can agree that this little berry is now anything but insignificant or inconsequential…. See you at the festival!
Sources:
