In the pink - strawberry season!

A recipe for strawberry gratin

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Two of my cousins were boarded, in the English manner of education, in a school hundreds of miles from home. My mother, with her own memories of incarceration between the ages of 5 and 13, unvisited by her parents at a school in quite another country, would sometimes take my sister and me to liberate our cousins at weekends. 

Photo Klaus Einwanger

In the summer, she would drive us to a local Pick Your Own Strawberries field and hand us each a paper bag of sugar. With great solemnity, the farmer would place us on his weighing machine and make a notation. Then we were released into the fields where we sat among the rows dipping our strawberries into the sugar, until we were sated and my mother had read as much as she wished of her novel. We returned to the farmer who weighed us again and charged my mother a sum of money we assumed reflected our glorious greed.

Strawberries deserve ritual. You may, perhaps, have been eating them year round, though why it is hard to fathom. Of all produce, the reason for eating seasonally (and locally if you live in France, where seven varieties of Périgord strawberry have been granted a Guarantee of Control and Certification, or Kent, “the garden of England”) is best illustrated by the strawberry. The poly-tunnel version common to US supermarkets is more like a radish, even in summer.

It’s an ancient fruit. Roman literature mentions the strawberry in reference to its medicinal properties. What diseases they used it to cure isn’t known. But from the 1600s on, the entire plant was applied in the treatment of depression, maybe in recognition of the strawberry’s power to lift the spirits.

A more recent study has associated them with helping to slow down age-related memory loss. But I can’t remember which one. At any rate, over 16,000 women who weren’t me were measured for cognitive function. Those with the highest intake of strawberries showed between one-and-a-half and two-and-a-half years of delays in loss of thinking, remembering, and reasoning abilities. 

In a separate study, three cups of fresh strawberries eaten every day for eight weeks reduced cholesterol levels and other markers of atherosclerosis. 

Developing them from the wild woodland Fragaria vesca to their present pinnacle of sophistication was a challenge. Strawberries are both masculine and feminine. The plant the 16th century conquistadors brought back to Spain to cross with their own wild fruit was the female flower that had been cultivated by the Mapuche and Huilliche Indians of Chile. 

European monks were immediately entranced by the exotic import, featuring it in illuminated manuscripts. It shows up in English miniatures of the same period, and in paintings by Italian, Flemish and German artists. However, the fruit made a disappointing mouthful.

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymous Bosch

Then, in the middle of the 18th century, gardeners around Brittany in north west France noticed that when male woodland strawberries and male Fragaria virginiana from Virginia were planted in between rows of female Chilean strawberries, the latter produced large and abundant fruits. Well, duh.

Cultivators probably misunderstood the strawberry. (Warning: This is going to be a bit of a Sex Ed class and just as incomprehensible.) First, it isn’t a berry at all. It’s ‘an aggregate accessory fruit’, which means it has developed not in usual fruit fashion from the flower’s ovaries but from the tissues containing them. Second, its seeds are on the outside. And they are not, in fact, seeds. They are ovaries. Each single one that gets stuck in your teeth is a tiny ovary of the flower. With the seed inside. A bit of a fruit matryoshka nesting doll…

That male Fragaria virginiana is one of the two great New World ancestors without which we wouldn’t have the strawberry of today. The other ancestor is the female Fragaria chiloensis, the beach strawberry. Brought from Chile in 1714 by Amédée-François Frézier, French military engineer, explorer, mathematician, and spy, his name is now theirs, albeit spelled differently as fraise. (This is for those of you who enjoy pop quizzes.) 

Here’s another pop quiz nugget: The foodie who came up with the heavenly combination of strawberries and cream was, appropriately, an archbishop - Thomas Wolsey, cardinal of the Catholic Church, controller of the affairs of state of the English court of Henry VIII. His celestial culinary union didn’t protect him. He was eventually charged with treason, a regular habit of that monarch. Luckily for Wolsey, he died on his way back to London to answer the charges.

For your only other pop quiz question: which, in a business where global production of strawberries in 2017 was 9.2 million tonnes, is the world’s top producer? Clue: it is nowhere in Europe. It is - no surprise, really - China.

My grandfather used to sprinkle his whole strawberries with freshly ground black pepper, which he insisted enhanced their taste. Others believe in a splash of balsamic vinegar. My father taught me the English habit of roughly crushing strawberries with the back of a fork and a little sugar to bring out their flavour. 

This works to an extraordinary degree. If you’re making Eton Mess (the dessert of chopped strawberries folded into a mound of thickly whipped cream and broken meringue pieces), it’s worth crushing a portion of the strawberries to marble through it once you’ve incorporated everything else. 

Should you puree strawberries for a sauce, add the juice of at least one lemon, along with sugar to taste. The acid will enormously intensify their flavour. 

Photo Klaus Einwanger, The Bruno Cookbook, Martin Walker & Julia Watson

500g/1lb strawberries
½ cup/3½ oz/100g sugar
5 egg yolks
⅔ cup/5 fl oz/15cl Monbazillac (Périgord dessert wine), Marsala or other sweet wine

Hull the strawberries and slice them in half or quarters and pile into a serving dish.

If you don’t own a double boiler, in a glass or metal bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the sugar till pale. Over low heat, set the bowl in the mouth of a saucepan above simmering water that doesn’t touch its bottom, and continue to whisk till the egg mixture begins to thicken. (If you’re concerned about curdling, beating a couple of pinches of cornflour into the yolks before you begin can help.) Very gradually add the wine, continuing to whisk till thick and foamy. Pour over the strawberries and place briefly under the preheated grill or broiler of the oven to brown here and there or use a kitchen blow torch. Serve immediately.