by Nancy Yos

Created on: June 15, 2009

It's a simple recipe, from Jean Anderson's "The Food of Portugal." Steep fresh sliced strawberries in sugar - a few teaspoons, or to taste - and one quarter cup of ruby port. Eat. Mrs. Beeton essentially agrees, in her book written more than a hundred years before, but her recipe calls for sherry or madeira, and she means you to preserve the strawberries by the quart "in perfectly dry glass bottles." Preserve, for how long? She doesn't say. Perhaps her readers understood, one preserved them until the following winter.

Strawberries are a strange fruit. People rave about how good they are, and snap them up when they are on sale at the grocery store this time of year, oh how wonderful, such a harbinger of spring - I snap them up too, two quarts for $5 - and yet they are so confoundedly sour. Madeleine Kamman in "The New Making of Cook" says sternly, "Unless you grow your own, you have absolutely no idea what a truly delicious strawberry tastes like." Mass production of varieties sturdy enough to withstand shipping and to look good and red right now has resulted in berries which are "nothing more than bundles of colored fibers with almost no taste whatsoever." She suggests starting your own strawberry patch from heirloom seeds. As fragaria are prolific, "you will soon find yourself" overrun with strawberries.

She may be right about that. My own experiments with strawberry plants in pots on the porch steps was not a success, but the confinement to pots may have been my mistake. No sooner would a small white berry begin to blush the remotest shade of pink, than overnight some hungry creature with a brain to think with would eat it. Bird, rabbit, squirrel, who knows what. I gave up, just as I have given up with poppies, which have also failed to survive predators here. But, if you give your strawberry plants more room, you may find, as Madeleine claims and as the first settlers in Virginia discovered, that before too long you are tripping over all that deliciousness, tripping over the "heart seed berry," wuttahimneash, as the Indians are supposed to have called them. In his book "Food" Waverley Root describes the strawberry patch on his own farm exactly answering to the account of the fruit given by "one of the first Englishmen to reach Maryland: 'wee can not sett downe foote but tred on strawberries.' "

He, too, says the wildly growing kind are delicious beyond expression, but too small and fragile even to be picked and brought into the house. They must be consumed

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