Blueberries and Thermodynamics

“In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics”.

That has to be the best ever Homer Simpson quote, how many times do I reference it? Homer’s summation of entropy and irreversibility in nature.

Nature moves on, things undo, ever edging towards disorder. Think of a teenager’s bedroom. That’s thermodynamics.

Time’s arrow, thermodynamics, the wheel of time. Observed and celebrated, whether it is the Gaelic feast of harvest, Lughnasadh, or - around the same time - Fraughan Sunday, when fraocháns or wild bilberries were traditionally gathered.

We McKennas have a similar Sunday (or rather a whole weekend), where we celebrate both a wild harvest and nature’s descent into disorder and disobedience.

It’s known in our house as Electric Picnic Sunday. It’s the weekend at the end of August, beginning of September where our cultivated version of Fraughans are gathered. Fraughans, or wild bilberries are tricky to cultivate. The nearest we can get to growing them is to grow blueberries, which we have done for the last ten or so years.

Our blueberry harvest has got better and better, and they are always ready for picking around about this weekend. We know this to our cost (and this is the chaos and entropy bit). We know this weekend is good for blueberries because, for a number of years we lost them. Each year we would look at the ripening fruit closely. Our free-range chickens would cast a beady eye at the bushes as well, albeit from a slightly lower altitude.

Then… off we would go, at the end of August, as a family, to Electric Picnic, leaving the chickens in the care of our two dogs.

Result: we would come back and find that the lovely blueberries, having reached perfection, would have been all eaten by the chickens. Our only resort was to make blueberry muffins or soda bread with the eggs from these greedy, unruly creatures.

Nowadays, entropy and nature has taken one further twist, in the form of the fox and we have to buy eggs, but at last we have our blueberries - and what a crop this year!



Blueberry Sodabread

400g strong white flour
1 heaped teaspoon bread soda
100g blueberries
salt
400ml buttermilk
1 egg
1 tablespoon honey

Preheat your oven to 210ºC. Put the flour into a large bowl, and sift in the bread soda. Stir in the blueberries and the salt. Measure out the buttermilk in a jug, and then beat the egg and honey, using a fork. 

Make a well in the centre of the flour and pour in the buttermilk/egg mixture. Using a wooden spoon, stir everything together until you get a ball of dough in the middle of the bowl. Using a little more flour, bring the dough together lightly with your hands. Turn onto a baking tray and mark with a cross at the top, cutting about an inch down into the dough. Bake in the oven for approximately 30 minutes.