Strawberries and the Performance of Summer

There is a photograph somewhere in my parents' house of me aged about seven, standing in a garden, holding a bowl of strawberries with the expression of someone who has been told to look pleased and has decided to take this instruction very seriously. It is a very British photograph. The sun is doing its best. Someone, just out of frame, has produced a jug of cream.

This is, more or less, how strawberries have always worked in Britain. They are not simply a fruit. They are a prop.

Strawberries are eaten all over the world and enjoyed everywhere without particular ceremony. In most places, they are pleasant seasonal fruit — sweet, briefly available, nice in a tart or on their own or with a small amount of sugar. In Spain they come with orange juice. In Italy they occasionally come with balsamic vinegar, which sounds wrong and is correct. In Scandinavia they appear at midsummer with a simplicity that suggests the whole business is being handled by sensible adults.

In Britain, they come with a complicated social performance that has been running, largely unchanged, since the 1870s.

The Wimbledon connection — which is the source of most of it — is so embedded that the two things have become essentially inseparable in the national imagination, which is odd when you examine it for more than a moment, because Wimbledon takes place in late June and July, at which point British strawberries are genuinely at their best, which suggests the timing was either inspired or lucky. Around 28,000 kilograms of strawberries are consumed at Wimbledon every year, according to figures that someone has clearly been keeping track of with considerable dedication. They cost more than they should. They are eaten outdoors with cream in the English summer, which means at least twice during the fortnight someone is attempting this operation under an umbrella.

Nobody seems to mind. This is the thing about strawberries and the British. The conditions are almost beside the point.

The strawberry itself has a history that is considerably more dramatic than its current role as the edible mascot of a tennis tournament would suggest.

Wild strawberries — small, intensely flavoured, the size of a child's fingernail — have been eaten in Europe since the Stone Age, and cultivated in gardens since at least the fourteenth century, when Charles V of France had over a thousand plants installed at the Louvre, which gives you some sense of both royal priorities and the state of French royal gardens in the 1360s. For most of history, this was the strawberry people knew: tiny, perfumed, slightly maddening to pick in any useful quantity.

The strawberry we eat today — large, uniform, available in February wrapped in plastic — is a different creature entirely. It arrived in the eighteenth century, the accidental result of crossing a North American species with a Chilean one in a French garden, producing a hybrid that was bigger, hardier, and easier to grow at scale. The man responsible, a French naval officer named Amédée-François Frézier, had brought the Chilean variety back from a spying mission in 1714, which makes him either a botanist of accidental genius or simply someone who packed interesting luggage.

His name, in a detail that is either very satisfying or completely contrived, derives from the French word for strawberry. Fraise. I choose to find this satisfying.

At the market near me, the strawberries arrive in May looking optimistic and smelling extraordinary and costing slightly more than they did the week before, when they were coming from somewhere warmer and tasted of very little. This is the other thing about strawberries: the gap between a good one and a bad one is larger than with almost any other fruit. A bad strawberry is watery and pale inside, faintly bitter, with the flavour of what strawberries are supposed to taste like rather than actually tasting of it. A good one — local, ripe, eaten shortly after picking — is sweet and slightly acidic and complex in a way that is difficult to describe without sounding like a wine bore.

The difference, as with the asparagus, is almost entirely a matter of timing. The strawberry wants to be eaten quickly and in season and not refrigerated if possible, because cold dulls everything that makes it interesting. Large-scale commercial production has spent considerable effort making the strawberry available and consistent and year-round, which is a reasonable ambition, but the cost is that the best version of the thing is now considered unusual rather than standard, which is a strange inversion to have arrived at.

The best strawberry I have ever eaten was in a field in Kent, picked off the plant into a paper punnet, eaten standing up in the sun, with dirt on my hands and no cream in sight. It cost about £2.50 for the punnet. It tasted, very genuinely, like an occasion.

The cream question is worth addressing briefly, because it turns out to be more contentious than it has any right to be.

In Devon and Cornwall, the debate about whether the cream or the jam goes on first — on a scone, technically, but the strawberry is implicated — has the character of a longstanding territorial dispute. Cornwall says jam first, then cream. Devon says cream first, then jam. Both sides hold their positions with a conviction that suggests the matter is not really about scones at all but about something older and more stubborn. The Queen was reported to prefer jam first. This resolved nothing.

Away from the scone entirely, the cream-with-strawberries tradition is so standard in Britain that questioning it feels faintly seditious. And yet: the Italian method, strawberries macerated briefly in balsamic vinegar and a little sugar, is better. There, I've said it. The vinegar sharpens everything, concentrates the flavour, makes the strawberry taste more like itself. You would not know this from looking at the combination, which sounds like a dare. You would know it immediately from tasting it.

I recommend it unreservedly to anyone who is not at Wimbledon, where the cream is non-negotiable and the queue is long and someone nearby is almost certainly eating theirs in the rain with an expression of determined enjoyment.

As one should.