A handful of small berries of a deep orange-red, supple under the finger, with finely wrinkled skin and a discreet sweetness somewhere between sun-dried tomato and cherry: this is goji, which the Chinese call 枸杞子 (Gǒu Qǐ Zǐ).
Behind its air of a sweet treat hides one of the plants most laden with culture and legend in the whole Chinese tradition, and the star of this late season.
Botanical portrait
Goji is the fruit of the wolfberry, a thorny shrub of the Solanaceae family, the same as the tomato, the sweet pepper and the aubergine.
Two cousin species supply it, Lycium barbarum, by far the most cultivated, and Lycium chinense: hardy bushes with small mauve flowers, whose elongated berries ripen from summer to autumn.
The berries are picked fully ripe, when they turn bright red.
Fragile, they are harvested gently so as not to bruise them.
They are then dried in the sun on racks, or in a dryer, until they take on the slightly wrinkled suppleness we know them for.
Ningxia, the land of rubies
Not all regions of China are equal in the eyes of connoisseurs.
The most renowned is Ningxia (宁夏 Níngxià), an autonomous region of the north-west where the Yellow River waters a dry, sunny plain at the foot of the Helan mountains.
Goji has been grown there for centuries, so much so that it counts among the region’s “five treasures”, where it is the red treasure.
Ningxia goji now carries a geographical indication, and it is picked there in two rounds: from June to the end of July, then from September until the first frosts.
The continental climate (hot days, cool nights, dry air) is said to give plumper, sweeter berries there.
As with a great wine, connoisseurs speak of terroir: the same plant does not have quite the same character elsewhere.
In the kitchen and in culture
In Chinese cooking, goji is everywhere, discreet and familiar: tossed into a simmering broth, scattered over a bowl of congee, slipped into the “eight treasures” tea blends (八宝茶 bābǎochá) sipped from Ningxia to Gansu, it colours and sweetens without ever taking over.
It is also nibbled as it is, like a dried fruit.
But it is perhaps in poetry that it shines most.
Under the Tang, several poets sang of the old wolfberry leaning over a monastery well, and Liú Yǔxī left the clearest image of it: dark foliage wrapping the stone curb, ripe berries of a deep red mirrored in the copper jug.
Its old root, he writes, had even taken the shape of an auspicious dog.
Ruby of autumn, goji keeps in Chinese memory the colour of a serene and luminous late season.
To discover
The portrait continues at the table.
Goji berries - 枸杞子 (Gou Qi Zi), small elongated berries, soft and gently tangy, are nibbled like a dried fruit, steeped in a cup of hot water or slipped into a broth at the end of cooking, where they swell and give up their colour.
As the frost spreads and autumn closes, goji makes the link with the season to come: a small red light in the grey of October, it heralds the colourful, comforting dishes of winter.
It is kept close at hand until spring.
Winter, as it happens, will be our next stop: the season that the classical thought of the five Phases entrusts to Water.
