What is a lingonberry? Taste, other names and how it differs from cranberry

Lingonberry is a word many people meet for the first time on a jar or a menu, and then go and look up. If that is how you got here, this is the plain answer: what the plant is, what the berry tastes like, and what it is called where you live. It also covers how it differs from the cranberry it keeps getting confused with.

What a lingonberry actually is

The lingonberry is Vaccinium vitis-idaea, a close relative of the bilberry and the cranberry. It is a low evergreen dwarf shrub, roughly ankle height, that grows in dry pine heath forest and on better-drained ground than the bilberry prefers. The leaves are small, glossy and leathery, dark green on top and paler underneath, with edges that curl slightly downwards.

The berries are small and bright red, and they grow in tight clusters at the tips of the stems rather than singly along the branch. The plant is native right across the boreal north: Finland, Sweden and Norway, through Russia and Siberia, and on into Canada and Alaska. In Finland it is not farmed to any real extent. The lingonberries in a Finnish shop were almost always picked in a forest.

In a typical year the berries begin to ripen in late August, are at their peak through September, and can still be picked into October. That is a typical range, not a promise. A cold or wet summer pushes everything later, and Lapland runs one to three weeks behind the south.

What it is called in other languages

This is the question that brings most people here, so here it is. Start with the Nordic names: puolukka in Finnish, lingon in Swedish, which is where the English word comes from, and tyttebær in both Norwegian and Danish.

Further south the names shift. In German it is Preiselbeere, and in parts of northern Germany you will also hear Kronsbeere. French has airelle rouge, Spanish arándano rojo, Italian mirtillo rosso.

In Russian it is брусника (brusnika), in Japanese コケモモ (kokemomo), and in Chinese 越橘 (yuèjú). Korean usually writes it 링곤베리 (lingonberi), though the plant name 월귤 (wolgyul) also exists.

English has a few names of its own for the same berry: cowberry, mountain cranberry, foxberry, and partridgeberry in Newfoundland. They are all Vaccinium vitis-idaea.

One honest warning for German speakers: the word Preiselbeere is printed on many jars in German-speaking shops that actually contain American cranberries, Vaccinium macrocarpon. They are not the same fruit, so turn the jar around and check the Latin name. The same problem exists in Spanish and Italian, where arándano rojo and mirtillo rosso are routinely used for cranberry as well.

What it tastes like

Honestly: sharp. A ripe lingonberry is tart first, with a slight bitterness behind the tartness, and only faintly sweet. Even that sweetness only shows once the berry is fully ripe. Many Finnish pickers say a light night frost improves the flavour, though berries that have frozen hard go soft and do not keep as well.

Most people do not eat them by the handful straight from the plant the way they would bilberries. This is a berry that wants either sugar or something rich and salty beside it, which is exactly how the Nordic countries have long eaten it.

Can you eat lingonberries raw?

Yes. Lingonberries are eaten uncooked, and much of the traditional use is raw. The simplest Finnish preparation is puolukkasurvos, and the Swedish equivalent is rårörda lingon: fresh berries crushed with a little sugar, stirred until the sugar dissolves, and eaten as they are. Whole lingonberries were also stored for the winter simply covered in cold water, with nothing else added.

The reason this works, when the same treatment would turn most berries to mould within a week, is chemistry. Lingonberries naturally contain benzoic acid, the same substance used as a preservative in a lot of manufactured food. It is why crushed or water-covered lingonberries keep for months in a cool larder, traditionally through the whole winter. It is preservation chemistry, and a large part of the reason lingonberry became the winter berry of the north.

How Finns and Swedes eat it

Lingonberry jam is the everyday form, and it sits on the table next to savoury food far more often than sweet. It goes with meatballs, with fried liver, with reindeer, with elk and other game, and with blood pancakes, where the tartness cuts through everything rich on the plate. A spoonful goes on morning porridge.

In Finland it is whipped into vispipuuro, a pale pink semolina porridge beaten until it is light and airy and eaten with milk as a dessert or at breakfast. It goes into pastries, cakes and pies, and reduced with stock and a little cream it becomes a sauce for roast meats. Very little of this is complicated: the berry, some sugar, and something to eat it with.

Lingonberry vs cranberry

The two get confused constantly, in every language above, so it is worth setting them side by side. The lingonberry is Vaccinium vitis-idaea. The wild Nordic cranberry is Vaccinium oxycoccos, with a smaller sister species in Finland, Vaccinium microcarpum, the pikkukarpalo. The large farmed cranberry sold in supermarkets is Vaccinium macrocarpon.

The plants do not look alike. Lingonberry is a small upright evergreen shrub with firm glossy leaves, standing on dry pine heath. Cranberry is a thread-thin creeping stem with tiny leaves, running flat across wet sphagnum bog, often half-buried in the moss. If your feet are dry you are probably in lingonberry country; if they are wet, you are in cranberry country.

The berries differ too. Lingonberries are small, roughly six to ten millimetres, firm, and held in clusters at the tip of the shoot. Wild cranberries are pea-sized or a little larger and grow singly on their threads; the farmed American cranberry is bigger again, up to two centimetres. All of them have air pockets inside, which is why they float and why farmed cranberry fields can be harvested by flooding them.

Lingonberries ripen from late August into October. Wild cranberries come later, September into October, are usually left until after the first frost, and are sometimes picked in spring after the snow melts.

On the tongue, lingonberry is tart with a slight bitterness. To most people cranberry tastes sharper and more purely sour, and the wild Nordic species is sharper again than the farmed American one. We have written separately about how the wild Nordic cranberry differs from the American one.

Then there is the language trap. Swedish lingon is lingonberry and tranbär is cranberry. Finnish puolukka is lingonberry and karpalo is cranberry. German Preiselbeere is lingonberry and Moosbeere, or increasingly just Cranberry, is cranberry — though in Bavaria and Austria Moosbeere is sometimes used for the lingonberry too.

Picking them, and what to do after the season

Under Finland’s everyman’s right, jokamiehenoikeus, you can pick wild lingonberries on almost any land without asking anyone. The limits are the usual ones: keep clear of gardens and yards, leave cultivated fields alone, and do not damage the plants. That means no cutting or pulling of branches, and a light hand with the berry picker.

The season comes after the bilberry season, and it overlaps with cranberry, rowan and sea buckthorn. We have put the whole autumn calendar in a separate guide to the Finnish autumn berry season.

Lingonberries keep better than most wild berries, which is a large part of their value, but the fresh season is still only a couple of months. Frozen, they hold up well: freeze them dry and loose on a tray, then bag them, and they will still be sound the following summer.

The other route is to take the water out altogether. That is the old way of keeping a harvest, and for lingonberry it is still the right one: ours is wild-picked in Finland, air-dried at low temperature, and milled into lingonberry powder. One ingredient, nothing added, and it keeps in a cupboard rather than a freezer. Our whole bilberries and bilberry powder are freeze-dried instead, because a bilberry is a far more fragile berry than a lingonberry.

Be clear about what that is and is not. The powder is as tart as the berry, so a spoon of it in porridge still wants a little sugar, and it will not give you whole berries for rårörda lingon. What it does give you is the sharpness of the berry in a sauce or a porridge in March, when the pine heath is under a metre of snow.

From our shop: Lingonberry Powder →