Strawberries & Disappointment

I ate roasted asparagus last night.  I will eat roasted asparagus tonight.  I have seen the first clamshells of campari tomatoes, ripened on the vine and alluringly red, priced lower than winter’s stratospheric rates.  I bought radishes – brightly magenta and plump with peppery promise.  There are a lot of fresh vegetables that I look forward to, each spring, but what really lights me up is the availability of fresh, in-season fruit.

It seems to be jumping the gun a little to look at summer fruit, in April.  Not that I haven’t tried.  There are some beautiful raspberries available at Granville Island Public Market right now, but affordable only to the Rockefellers at the moment.  Supermarkets have been selling little shallow trays of blueberries (good, but pricy) for a few weeks now, but the raspberry selection in the regular markets has been dubious to say the least, and bordering on moldy if my suspicions are correct.  The strawberries are making their customary, optimistic early appearance, and I watch in amazement as people snatch up the punnet containers and cram them into their shopping baskets.

The commercial strawberry is a big disappointment to me.  We in Canada account for 75% of California’s fresh strawberry exports – over 12 million trays of fresh strawberries.  According to the California Strawberry Commission, all fresh strawberries in California are hand-picked to “ensure only the highest quality berries are harvested.”  Sadly, all evidence suggests that the qualities that the California growers are going for include colour, size, and shelf-life at the expense of flavour.  Now, before I turn into everyone’s grandmother, reminiscing about how strawberries (and everything else) used to taste different when I was a kid, I think that there is some truth to it in this case.  The monoculture attitude of North American growers is gradually reducing the variety of strawberry available, and commercial shipability concerns are leading to scientific decisions that end up sacrificing flavour.

When was the last time you ate a really delicious strawberry, full of flavour?  I bet it wasn’t one purchased at a store, but one from a friend or neighbour’s garden – or  even your own.   It probably wasn't in the dead of winter either.  I’ve become hostile to the clamshell packages of strawberries that I see at most markets, and it has even extended down to the peculiarly piled berry pyramids down at Granville Island Public Market.  It’s an art, fruit-stacking, and the good folks down at the Market have it down:  monstrous mounds of cherries, all inexplicably stem-inward, towering twice or three times the height of the basket they are in.  I’m afraid to buy fruit there, sometimes, because I worry that I’ll have to buy the entire truckload.  Usually the produce is of excellent quality down at the Market, but my growing distrust of strawberries still leaves me feeling wary.

I guess that part of the issue is that I’m fussy about strawberries.  While I’m willing to embrace artificial or faux flavours for just about any other fruit, I never pick strawberry.  That goes for candy, gum, ice cream, yogurt, beverages, lip balm and mysteriously red “fruit glazes” as well.  I’ve been disappointed too often.  There is simply no synthetic equivalent or acceptable approximation of strawberry flavour.  I would rather eat something completely different, than a lacklustre, sweet, chemically boosted attempt at strawberry.  For a long time, I assumed that it is the chemical furaneol (2,5-Dimethyl-4-hydroxy-3(2H)furanone ..C₆H₈O₃), also known as strawberry furanone to which I am so sensitive.  However, furaneol has been identified as a major flavour component in many fruits, from strawberries to grapes to tomatoes and I certainly have no problem with artificial grape flavours – although as far as I know, I’ve never had artificial tomato flavour.  Maybe furanone is better employed when it is not the dominant component of the flavour.

So why am I so particular about the strawberry?  Sure, I picked them as a kid, from our garden or those of friends and relatives, but they were hardly the holy grail of fruit to me.  That was a toss-up between the exotic nectarine, and dark red Bing cherries as the favourite fruits of my childhood.  I have fond memories of strawberry shortcake – the kind made with sweet biscuits rather than sponge cake and certainly not the nauseating little scented dolls put out by Bandai America Inc. in 1980.  Strawberries were a common, if only seasonally available, treat.  Glad to see them in late spring or early summer, blasé by early autumn.

There was a secret field of tiny woodland strawberries down by the creek on a nearby power line, where I grew up.  Every year I hoped to be the one to get there first, just as the berries were ripe, but before any of the neighbouring hobby-farms staked out their goats or other livestock to graze.  I would sit on a carefully picked-clean mossy bit with my empty ice cream bucket, and pick as many as I could possibly find, running my fingers through the little leaves to turn up berries about the size of my smallest fingernail.  I didn’t know it at the time, but these fraises du bois (Fragaria vesca) are the most cherished of strawberries among the French.  I did know that if I got more than a handful, I could take them home and help them become dessert.  But these were no more exciting than the tiny, sweet bramble berries growing near the well, and fond as I am of them, I am still happy to eat the larger-seeded more commercial blackberries.

I do sometimes buy strawberries, though.  Feeling hopeful, sometime in mid-summer, I’ll pick up a clamshell of red, red berries and, checking my pessimism at the door, lug them home for tasting.  Sometimes, they’re pretty good, must mostly they reinforce my negative impression of commercial strawberries.  There is hope beyond jam making, however, when faced with a full clamshell of sour or indifferent strawberries:  Slice as many as you’d like into a dessert bowl.  Sprinkle with sugar (more sugar if they’re quite sour, less if they’re sweet but bland), pour over a little splash of rum – light or dark, it’s up to you – and drizzle with a tablespoon or two of half-and-half.  Congratulate yourself on saving a basket of near worthless berries, and eat.  This dessert is the only reason I still maintain enough hope to buy strawberries at all.  And every year, I do.

April 2005