Instructions: As a teenager, while other kids rebelled against their parents with drugs and sex, I rebelled with food. My parents were enamored of processed food products.

Anything canned, frozen or faked was all right by them.

But the flabby bread and tasteless veggies they craved left me feeling unsatisfied. By the time I was 13, I started to shop and cook my way out of their Brave New World of prepackaged eating, spending my allowance on groceries

A few years into this cooking spree, I noticed that blueberries were a dominant theme. Theyd become my fresh-food Holy Grail, symbolizing everything delightful and authentic I was searching for - and rebelling against.

Id never even heard of blueberries until I started school. My parents didnt bring blueberry products home because they didnt grow up with them. In the South, its too hot for the plants to grow in the wild. They had made wine with elderberries, scratched their arms picking blackberries and searched the woods for wild grapes. But blueberries were unfamiliar and somehow suspicious.

I, of course, had the opposite reaction. When my kindergarten teacher, Miss Ing, read Blueberries for Sal at circle time, I was fascinated. What was it about those little bluish balls that would make people leave their cozy homes and face down bears? Sadly, my curiosity would be unrequited for years. The Hostess pies I ate, filled with thick blueberry glop, gave no clue. The canned blueberries in junior high home economics class were good, and the so-called fresh ones in the supermarket were better. But it took a trip to a berry farm in northern Maryland to find out what the fuss was all about.

Seven years ago I moved east with my husband, so he could do postdoctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. One Saturday I went with friends to a pick-your-own berry place near the Pennsylvania border.

There, in air thick with heat, my blueberry infatuation turned into true love.

There were no middlemen, no plastic containers to come between us, just the fruit and I. These berries were tender and juicy, surprising my taste buds with notes of spice and pine resin. I wandered up and down the rows, the sun hot on my shoulders, eating as I went. When it was time to go home, my galvanized tin pail was empty, but my stomach and soul were satisfied.

Related to cranberries, and the more elusive huckleberry, blueberries have only been grown commercially since 1920, taking advantage of otherwise unproductive marshland.

In the wild, the plants can be found from Canada to Colombia, producing berries on either scrubby (low-bush) or bushy (high-bush) plants. They like acid or sandy soil that stays moist throughout spring and summer.

Native Americans used the leaves as well as the fruit for cooking, and the colonists substituted them for bilberries, another blueberry cousin that grows all over Northern Europe and the British Isles.

In California, local berries are available from late May through August.

There is no real difference in berries grown on the East and West coasts (or New Zealand, for that matter), since growers in both areas favor shelf life over taste. Many varieties in the supermarket now are unpleasantly crunchy.

For truly sweet blueberries, you have to either go to a pick-your-own farm, grow them yourself, or order more-intensely flavored wild blueberries (see information below).

When we moved back to California and bought a house, some of the first plants to go into the garden were blueberries. They have a sunny spot where they lord it over the thyme, spearmint and strawberries.

They are very easy to grow. I keep their feet (or roots) wet, and I compost my spent tea leaves and coffee grounds at the base of each plant. I grow five varieties - out of necessity as well as for pleasure, since most blueberries need to cross-pollinate to bear fruit.

The Earliblues ripen first. The classic cultivated berry - big and juicy, but on the bland side - they are really better for baking. The fruit on the Georgia Gem has a spicy floral perfume flavor, while Sunshine Blues are tangy and the Olympics are the sweetest. Then there is the Bush of the Unknown Berry

(the kids ripped the tag off). Though unnamed, it is much loved because it gives the most fruit - big clusters of sweet, medium-sized berries, with a black-pepper, pine-resin finish.

In past harvests, my family and I have simply stood among the bushes to eat the fruit out of hand. But this year, with some self-restraint, I actually baked something with my berries - a cobbler of Lilliputian size, more of an amuse-bouche than a dessert. But the just-picked berries did make a difference. It was one of the best things I had ever eaten. Heres the recipe I used, from the 1963 edition of the McCalls Cookbook, which I bought as a present to myself on my 13 th birthday. I promise it will make even ordinary berries sublime.

If you would like to email yourself the recipe for later use, or share the recipe with your friends or family, enter the email addresses below and this recipe will be emailed to you and others as well.