Whatever happened to eating 'local'?
A summer recipe for a mousse with strawberry sauce
The funky oddity of sparrowgrass is well known to devotees of asparagus. If you are in the dark over what I refer to, step into the bathroom after an asparagus eater has just vacated it. Aspargusic acid isn’t the worst of sulphur smells but it is very sprightly. It can ‘air’ as soon as 15 minutes after the asparagus has been eaten. Or as long as 14 hours later.
Not as far as Louis the basset hound is concerned. In Seattle recently, I fed this baron of bassets the fibrous ends of asparagus while we lingered, chins streaked with browned butter, over the tender steamed parts of these first stalks of spring. It occurred to his pet (AKA his owner) and I that if he had anything like a human’s digestive response, on his next walk there could be a pack of very confused dogs following his sprinkled trail in the dog park, trying to identify its donor.
Yet surprisingly, there was no ammonia quality to either his or our own emiction. Nor, to be honest, was there even much flavour to the asparagus. It was asparagus from Safeway, grown in Peru. At least it didn’t vary in taste from Peruvian asparagus bought in December, or February, or any month of the year, if that’s a merit. Nor, impressively, did the stalks diverge from a regulated size, each one equally pencil long and fountain-pen fat.
I came home to England’s asparagus season, a short-lived affair. In whatever shape the asparagus grows is how it is sold, like the green thumbs of these in the photo that I cooked to eat with shrimp. They burst with flavour and later filled the bathroom and beyond with a familiar asparagus aftermath reek. No doubt seasonal asparagus from Seattle’s farmers’ markets would have had just as much flavour. But the supermarket versions sold in any country demonstrate the difference in quality between locavore and flyer-miles food.
Globally, supermarkets operate on the impetus of supplying consumers whatever we want whenever we want it. While that allows us to indulge our whims, we’re not getting produce at its best.
Take strawberries. With its almost year-round stable climate and its poly-tunnels, Mexico can supply strawberries to the American market on any winter’s day that someone desires those ping-pong ball sized fruits that have no flavour unless they’ve been dipped in melted chocolate.
Out-of-season strawberries are a relatively new privilege. Traditionally, it’s only June that has been known to many American Indian tribes of the eastern US seaboard as “the Strawberry Moon”, the month for celebrating those tiny scented wild strawberries that 18th century French philosopher and art critic Diderot described as being like “the tip of wet-nurses’ breasts.” Even today in Somers, Connecticut, over 10,000 people gather to attend the Strawberry Moon Powwow, drinking strawberry moon tea and eating strawberry pan cake, as do the Wampanoag tribe in Massachusetts, the Sokaogon Chippewa Community in Mole Lake, Wisconsin, and many others.
Early European settlers to America fell for the wild strawberries they discovered in Virginia. John Tradescant, 17th century gardener and plantsman, brought plants back to England while other settlers took them to France. In 1712, Amédée-François Frézier, a French naval officer whose name gave the berries in France the word ‘fraise’, returned to Brest with five plants of the Chilean sand strawberry that he had found on the west coast of South America. It was passed to the Professor of Botany at the Royal Garden in Paris, Bernard de Jessieu, who developed it and sent plants across Europe where it flourished but produced little fruit. Then, in the 18th century, French botanist Antoine Nicholas Duchesne, a student of de Jussieu, bred a strawberry the size of the Chilean fruit with the flavour of the Virginia wild one, creating the modern strawberry.
These days, developing strawberries for the year-round, unseasonal market has given us the reverse - strawberries large in size and small in flavour.
In the rush to focus on reducing meat consumption and replacing what we can with plant- and cell-based flesh, eating seasonally and locally has recently slipped from public discourse. You don’t read much these days of the contribution to global warming of produce flown thousands of miles. We focus instead on the impact on climate change of the methane emissions of the beasts we eat.
Small farmers have little bargaining power in the face of supermarket chains whose food is rarely traceable to a local address. Locally sourced produce, grown in smaller quantity, is generally more expensive. Now we’re coming into the full growing season of the best of the year’s fruit and vegetables, spend what you can afford in support of those producers working hard to grow for us edible treasures filled with flavour and nutrients. If we only ate food grown locally, as we did for thousands of years, we would reduce carbon footprints, pollution and water consumption and feed ourselves more nutritiously.
June was the month of my father’s birthday. Every year we celebrated the same way, with a picnic on the banks of the River Thames. And every year we feasted off asparagus, lobster mayonnaise, then strawberries and cream.
Father never ate his strawberries whole but crushed them into a scattering of unnecessary sugar for crunch with the tines of his fork. I recommend following his example. Somehow this releases an extra layer of flavour. All strawberries, grown in season and out, also benefit from a squeeze of lemon juice. This is a dessert that makes the most even of poorly-flavoured strawberries. If you don’t tell them, no-one will guess the mousse is made from yogurt. But it must be 100 percent fat Greek yogurt - though I’m sure you don’t eat anything else, given that to solidify reduced- or no-fat yogurt, gelatine or another thickener must be added. Which rather loses the point of the calorie reduction.
Serves 4
225g carton Greek yogurt
5 tablespoons sugar
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
egg white
Drain the yogurt in a paper towel-lined sieve over a bowl for at least an hour. Discard the liquid. Beat the sugar into the yogurt till it’s shiny then beat in the vanilla. Not more than 2 hours before eating it, whisk the egg white to soft peaks then fold it into the yogurt. Pile 3 or 4 tablespoons of the mousse into a pretty glass and surround with the strawberry sauce.
150g/5 oz strawberries
75g/2½ oz sugar
juice 2 lemons
Puree the fruit in a blender with the sugar and juice then press through a fine sieve to remove as many of the seeds as you can then chill in a jug till ready to serve.
Your words about wild strawberries brought me back to the late spring of 1975, when we were living on an old 500 acre farm, on a hill looking down toward the Connecticut River in Southeastern Vermont. That spring, the old, abandoned pastures were carpeted with wild strawberries, and I was up early every morning to gather as many of them as my then-young knees and back could tolerate. They were no bigger than a fingernail, and truth be told, rather sour and not terribly pleasant to eat raw. Cooked with sugar into jam, however, they became ambrosial. I was like a madwoman, obsessed with foraging and cooking wild berries that summer. I gathered enough tiny wild strawbs to make close to a gallon of wild strawberry preserves. And then came the dewberries, and the black raspberries, and the lowbush blueberries, and blackberries, and the fox grapes.
Another aspect to the presence or absence of asparagusic acid is the effect of pesticides and herbicides. Asparagusic acid is a photochemical that protects the plant from pests so when treated with pesticides the plant produces less of its own protectant. This is true of all of the vegetables and fruits we eat.
Lost in the research around organics is that organically produced fruits and vegetables have much higher levels of protective photochemicals. And these same compounds are protective for humans as well. Food research has always been underfunded- too difficult to monetize.
Julia, I so appreciate the light you shine on so many different foods and food ways!