Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Cook's Guide entry for Juniper Berries along with all the Juniper Berries containing recipes presented on this site, with 43 recipes in total.

This is a continuation of an entire series of pages that will, I hope, allow my visitors to better navigate this site. As well as displaying recipes by name, country and region of origin I am now planning a whole series of pages where recipes can be located by meal type and main ingredient. This page gives a listing of all the Juniper Berries recipes added to this site.

These recipes, all contain Juniper Berries as a major wild food ingredient.

Juniper berries are actually the seed cones of the Common Juniper, Juniperus communis and it has the largest range of any woody plant, covering the entire temperate northern hemisphere. It is a shrub or small tree, very variable and often a low spreading shrub, but occasionally reaching 10 m tall. Common Juniper has needle-like leaves in whorls of three; the leaves are green, with a single white stomatal band on the inner surface. It is dioecious, with separate male and female plants.



As a conifer the juniper actually bears seed cones rather than fruit, though these seed cones are very berry-like in appearance. It takes eighteen months for them to ripen from green to purple-black with a blue waxy coating. Its astringent blue-black seed cones, commonly known as juniper berries, are too bitter to eat raw and are usually sold dried and used to flavour meats, sauces, and stuffings. They are generally crushed before use to release their flavour. The cones are used to flavour gin. In fact, the word 'gin' is derived from the French word for juniper berry, genièvre. Juniper berries make good accompaniments to sauces for strongly-flavoured meats such as game and mutton. The recipe given here for game terrine employs juniper berries as a flavouring.