STRAWBERRIES, I love them!
Give me a meringue, crumble it, stir in as many strawberries as you feel you can eat, add a good dollop of lightly-whipped fresh cream (and I mean a good dollop), chuck in a generous portion of ice-cream, sprinkle the berries with sugar, and squeeze a generous amount of strawberry sauce over the lot – pure unadulterated bliss.
Now that this year’s Wexford outdoor crop is available, more bliss.
Without doubt, the Wexford strawberry is the tastiest strawberry you can eat; it’s so good, I might even forego the sugar.
Where the strawberry season used to last around ten weeks, cultivation progress, indoor growing and imports mean the season is practically year round.
That being said, some varieties are as bland as when man (or woman) first discovered they could be eaten. But when was that, and how has the strawberry developed since?
Let’s see if we can shed some light on that subject. It depends on which producing country you look at, and when, where and how the fruit was first discovered.
There are ancient records which would suggest that strawberries existed in Italy as far back as 234 BC (if the truth was known, probably much longer), and they are mentioned in Pliney’s Book of Natural History covering 23-79 AD as one of the natural products of Italy. Unfortunately, there is no further references, other than they were used for medicinal purposes.
In the 1300s, the French were first to move the wood strawberry Fragaria Vesca into their gardens where, although grown for ornamental use, the fruit was still eaten.
London, too, saw berries for sale in the markets around 1420-30.
However, today’s strawberry ancestors are a combination of fruits taken from the United States and Chile, which were cultivated in France. All this will become clearer as we go along. Just to clarify that Ireland’s claim to original strawberries is limited, I recall, as a youngster, picking wild berries on what we knew as the sandbanks, which are lands on the banks of the Slaney, about two miles from Clonegal, belonging to Huntington Castle.
Whether they still exist or not, I am not sure; neither can I really recall the taste, but it must have been OK. A popular tree in Australia, and a feature of many gardens is the Irish strawberry tree, which is a native of the south-west of this country.
It produces very small, round, tasteless berries in the autumn, (spring in Ireland) – the same time as it flowers for next year’s fruit. The wild strawberry could be found in most countries, with the exceptions of Africa, New Zealand and Australia.
In the early days, the strawberry was a small berry growing in the wilds of the United States, largely ignored by the natives. It was only when the Europeans arrived and started eating the fruit that the Indians, as we now call them, started cultivating it.
Now to pin down dates here is a bit of a puzzle: some record a period when it is difficult to imagine any Europeans in the US, so to give a timeframe, I feel it would be correct to recall that although Columbus discovered America, he never actually set foot on the mainland of the United States or Canada. He did land on many islands and set up colonies on those, claiming them for Spain. The first record of the mainland was when Cabela De Vaca mapped the coastline of Texas in 1528.
Britons were first to land on the east coast in 1607, with the Plymouth Colony in 1620.
They established a community in New England, which takes in the states of Maine, Vermont New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts. It is in the latter that strawberries are first mentioned, though not by that name.
Let us look at the how the name has developed. Originally, it may have been called a hayberry – that would have been the wild version in the 900s. The present cycle started with streowbeirge (streow being the Anglo-Saxon word for hay), strea beirge, streowberg, strew berian wisan, streberi leif, streberi wyse and, finally, strawberry.
It was in Virginia that the natives started cultivating plants to sell on seeing the newcomers’ interest.
It was, I believe, from here that the plants were shipped to Europe, although some sources say the plants were brought to Europe as early as the 1500s (doubtful from the timelines) by explorers, and the crossing of the plant with its European counterpart produced a bigger and sweeter berry.
However, one more step would take place before the strawberry we know today would come into existence.
This was the introduction of an exceptionally large berried plant which was discovered in Chile by a French naval engineer called Amedee-Francois Frewzier (who noted the berries could be as large as a hen egg), which the natives called Quelghen. With an interest in botany, Frewzier brought home seven plants.
Two were planted in the royal garden of Louis XIV and the remaining five were planted at Plougastel in Brittany, which has a similar climate to their home in Chile.
The plants grew and grew but produced no berries and it wasn’t until 30 years later that someone decided to grow a Virginian plant beside them.
This was a stroke of luck. Whereas back in Chile there were male and female plants, all those brought to France were female.
Male Virginian plants pollinating the female Chilean variety gave birth to the strawberry, from which every cultivated berry in the world today is a descendant.
So let us have a look at the berry itself. It is the only one with its seeds on the outside and it will usually have in the region of 200.
However, you cannot grow strawberries from seeds. This is done by runners, stalks that run out from the mother plant and reroot.
The new root is cut from the mother plant and resown.
The strawberry plant is part of the rose family.
The berries will stop ripening the moment they are picked, so make sure when purchasing that you buy the reddest shiniest berry, with a healthy green stem; also, eat as quickly as possible after purchase, as they will start to deteriorate, within 48 to 72 hours.
Some will say refrigerate as soon as possible after purchase, but my tip is if you are eating them today or tomorrow, don’t let them near the fridge. If you do, take them out hours before you eat, otherwise the cold will kill the flavour.
Another tip is wash them before removing the stems – otherwise you will again dampen the taste by having too much water content. If you want to freeze them, wash and dry first, lay out singly, do not put them on top of each other on a sheet of baking paper. When frozen, put them in a freezer bag until you wish to use them.
Contrary to some popular beliefs that the berry is best when grown in dry sunny conditions, this is not totally true. The plant needs to avoid drought conditions and is actually more productive in a cooler, more temperate climate.
Many growers will replant each year. This has many benefits: it will give a much higher quality berry and will avoid the possibility of disease. Strawberry growing is a precise and demanding job, which needs a lot of loving care.
Farmers who are not prepared to almost sleep with the crop may find themselves at a loss. And besides disease caused by either ground conditions or weather, you have to overcome attacks by birds so that you have to cover the crop with netting to save it, while every slug and snail in the parish will make their way to the strawberry field.
And if you are growing a few acres, it takes a lot of slug pellets to protect the berries.
The nutritional value of the strawberry is immense, and although the sugar content may be a wee bit higher than other fruits, the benefits far outweigh this, and it would take another article to detail all the goodness inside a strawberry.
There are many towns or areas called Strawberry in different countries. I will just mention two.
One is in Finland called Mansikkala, which translates to Place of the Strawberry Beds, where farms ripen berries 24 hours a day in the midnight sun and, of course, our own Strawberry Beds outside Lucan in Dublin.
So there ends my look at the strawberry, and perhaps next time you indulge, you will know a little more about what you are eating; perhaps you can impress the kiddies with your knowledge of this lovely fruit.