Speaking Of Strawberries...

Yes, Well. Strawberries.

I had a bowl yesterday afternoon in the interval of the children’s choral concert I mentioned in my last post, and utterly gorgeous they were too. I love strawberries; can’t get enough of them.

    WHEN, that is, they are in season. Which leads me to my rant.

Modern living is responsible for many things, but the one that I am going to concentrate on today is the way it has changed production of crops that previously were available at certain times of the year.

    Thanks to commercial farming and air travel and other such wonders, you see, we here in Blighty are now able to – supposedly – enjoy the majority of our ‘seasonal’ fruits and vegetables all year round. 

     Well, that may well be true on the vegetable front – up to a point – but on the subject of fruit I whole heartedly disagree; strawberries a case in point.

     Oh, sure, you can BUY them all year round from the majority of supermarket chains; but you can't enjoy them, or at least I can't.

     Because strawberries are sweet fruits; grown slowly in a damp country – like Britain, for instance – over a period of months that start off quite chilly and gradually progress to nicely warm (though still pretty damp). They are not designed to be grown in any other way, and that’s what the people in charge of such things aren’t grasping. Because the base fact of the matter is that no matter how careful you are, you cannot force a sweet fruit to grow quickly - particularly in the wrong kind of soil and in the wrong kind of climate - and stay sweet; it simply can't be done.

     So you are left with packets of mass produced red things with labels proclaiming things like "cultured in Brazil", and while they may look like strawberries and are called strawberries, they most decidedly are not; not anything like. 

     Strawberries are a seasonal fruit here in Britain. The time to harvest them is from mid June (at the earliest) to late august (at the latest), and that, ladies and gentlemen, is when they will be at their best. No need to pour sugar or cream (or both. Or at least, not unless you really want to) over strawberries ripened in the manner they are most suited to; they are perfectly delicious and more importantly beautifully sweet enough all on their own.

So there.

    Rant over.

Alice x