Strawberries

"A tale of arduous travel, and the richness of continents reduced to one small delight." Jane Grigson

I remember buying strawberries in little wooden punnets like this. Trouble with them was that you couldn't see what the ones at the bottom were like. Nowadays you can turn over the plastic container and see. So at least you shouldn't get any that have gone off these now. And there's a fair bit of work in those little punnets. I wonder if anyone makes them these days.

Strawberries are everywhere at the moment and they are very cheap. So maybe I should buy heaps and have a go at jam, though it's notoriously difficult to get to set. The current Coles Magazine has got strawberries everywhere in it, including a profile of one of their Queensland growers. Just to make us feel they care! So in the light of my strawberry salsa I thought I should do something about this fruit - which, in my head, is still quintessentially English - though, of course, it isn't - well some of them are, but not the ones we eat today.

Indeed there are a lot of fascinating things to know about strawberries. I got most of the history from Jane Grigson's Fruit Book but I also found little bits elsewhere and, of course, she was writing back in 1982 and a lot has changed on the strawberry front since then. Wikipedia, will, of course, give you the basic facts, but Jane Grigson had a few more interesting little asides. I will try to summarise.

There seem to be two kinds of European wild strawberry which is what people ate before the 18th century. The first is the woodland variety, which, as Jane Grigson says, can be "tiny and dry, a little seedy on the tongue." She is exactly right about this - I have tasted them and have often wondered why people go on about how wonderful they are. And in spite of their best attempts early gardeners could not improve them other than making them a little bigger. But there are also the alpine strawberries which are a bit larger and tastier and which you can still get sometimes - either by growing your own or by paying a lot of money - or maybe if you are lucky going up into the high European woods and mountains you may find some. They are called alpine, but really they are from high woods - 'haut bois' and are now called hautboys. A basket of them was painted by Chardin in 1761, and they were exported all around Europe. These are the ones that were eaten back then.

In the17th century a gardener called John Tradescant brought back a strawberry from Virginia to England, and others took it to France. It's taste was better than the wood strawberry but not as good as the Alpine one and because it's genetic makeup was different it couldn't be used to cross with the Alpine one to make something bigger and better. But then in 1712 a Frenchman brought back another kind from Chile - much larger, paler and tasting a little like pineapple. Wikipedia will give you all the botanical details. To cut a long story short, these two imported strawberries were crossed and cultivated until in 1821 the first modern strawberry hit the market. Since then, there have, of course, been many new breeds of strawberries - although unlike apples and potatoes we do not label our strawberries with their name. For a while, of course, the emphasis was on them looking good and staying firm but growers are waking up to the fact that the flavour suffered and yet more new kinds are being developed and are appearing on the market. I have to say that most of the strawberries that I buy taste pretty good to my uneducated palate. Sweet but a little bit tart, and juicy.

Inspired by the Chardin painting I had a quick look for other great artists works on strawberries. None from Van Gogh - didn't he like them? Were they too expensive, too girly? Anyway - from Bosch to Warhol, with Manet and Renoir in between.

In Australia we can now get strawberries all year round. Mostly from Queensland, but in the warmer months, from Victoria, specifically the Yarra Valley they say, though how they find room for them between the massive vineyards I'm not really sure. I thought they came from the Dandenongs, the other hills and the market gardens out west of Melbourne. South Australia is also a big producer in the warmer months, with the other states contributing smaller crops. Queensland is the big one though - on the Sunshine Coast - and that is where all the research is going on, and it was certainly the state that Coles was publicising.

Jane Grigson talked about growing strawberries over plastic to stop the weeds, but cultivation has moved on a lot since then. The Coles, Queensland farmers were still growing out in the fields, but many strawberries world-wide are now grown inside in those huge glass farms that I talked about way back. The one on the left is in England, on the right in Vietnam.

I have no doubt that there are even larger establishments - America and Japan are the world,'s largest producers of strawberries and I can imagine that in those two countries experimentation with growing methods is well advanced.

There is something a little sad about this. Strawberries used to be a special treat, associated with snobby events such as Wimbledon and Royal Ascot. They were a harbinger of summer. Now they are so cheap that you sort of have to buy them. Well I do anyway. I did try to grow them but, as usual here, to no avail. We used to grow them in England when I was a child. I was fascinated by the randomness of the runners that would shoot out everywhere, and which were then cut off, dug up and replanted in a more orderly manner. You couldn't keep them in straight lines for long though. I also remember a very sad occasion when my mother had netted the strawberries to prevent something eating them and a hedgehog got entangled in the netting and died. It was the only time I ever saw a hedgehog.

Ideally they should be eaten fresh from the plant - so this summer, pack up your children and grandchildren and go up into the hills to pick strawberries. Or if you are a better gardener than I - and who isn't - grow your own. You can grow them in a pot if you haven't got a garden. Careful of the birds and possums though. And Maggie Beer doesn't grow them any more in SA because of the millipedes.

Probably the best way to eat them is plain with cream - which really should be crème fraîche I think. (Incidentally it worked - add 2 tablespoons of buttermilk to a carton of pure cream, leave it out for 12 hours or so and voilà - crème fraîche. - or something very like it anyway.) And really - do not wash them unless you absolutely have to. If you do, don't hull them put them gently into a basin of water, swirl them gently and briefly, retrieve and pat dry with kitchen towel. These days the trend is to add either orange juice, balsamic vinegar (a few drops) or black pepper to your strawberries. I have only tried the orange juice, so can't say about the others. I have also seen it paired with basil a fair bit.

As I found the other day, they are possibly not that good cooked in cakes - I think they are too moist, but there are lots of recipes out there. There are literally thousands of recipes for things to do with strawberries, but I shall mention just two.

The first is no longer seen - Strawberries Romanov - a simple, classic recipe that seems to have gone out of fashion. Marinate strawberries in orange juice and one of the curaçao orange liqueurs in a covered bowl for several hours. Serve with whipped cream. Couldn't be simpler. I think liqueurs have gone out of fashion too.

The second is from Yotam Ottolenghi - that most modern of cooks. It's for a strawberry ketchup that you then have with barbecued or grilled meat. A savoury use for strawberries - which are often used in salads these days too.

A few more things - the 'seeds' on the outside are not technically seeds - they are ovaries with seeds inside them and there are around 200 on the average strawberry.

They couldn't really improve the plants all those years ago, because the plants were female and needed a male component to be able to change.

And it is claimed by some that Cardinal Wolsey invented the strawberries and cream combination.