Introducing: Strawberry Week

When produce is in peak season during spring and summer, I love to devote myself to one ingredient in particular. It’s a nice way to revel in the ephemeral nature of the seasons and appreciate what we have. This year, it’s the strawberry — a fruit that tends to taste like the water at the bottom of a flower vase when it’s bad, and like a juicy, sun-warmed bite of heaven when it’s good.

This five-part series will feature recipes for:

• Strawberry, Burnt Lemon & Pink Peppercorn Shrub

Before we get to all that, let’s talk about the berries, if we can even call them that.

The strawberry as we know it today was the result of a happy accident. It’s earliest garden varieties date back to the 1300s, brought in from the wilderness by the French. It wasn’t until the 1600s that Virginia strawberries were brought over to Europe. This new variety was much hardier than those that came before, but it was many years before it was widely appreciated. Then, in 1714, a French spy brought the Chilean strawberry back to France from Chile. What this variety offered was size. While it produced much larger fruit, the plant lacked fortitude and posed challenges with growing. It wasn’t until the Virginia and Chilean strawberries were accidentally cross-pollinated by the French that we arrived at a hybrid fit for mass growing.

The origin of the name “strawberry” is uncertain, though what we do know is that they’re not actually berries at all. In fact, most “berries” aren’t berries. Berries are derived from a single ovary of a flower. Their seeds are contained internally and the layers of their fruit walls aren’t distinct from one another, which means strawberries, blackberries and raspberries are not berries, but rather aggregate fruits.

If you have a u-pick nearby where you can pick strawberries right off the vine, by all means, do that. Few things are more romantic than hand picking fruit with the sun warming your skin. But most of us are more likely picking out a carton at the grocery store, and when you do, I recommend you give it a sniff. In Latin, strawberries are referred to as “fragra,” or fragrant. The way they smell should tell you all you need to know. You’re sniffing for something sweet, not that green grassy scent and not something that borders on boozy. When they reach the latter, they’re usually beginning to mold. As a general rule, I also recommend looking for smaller berries, which will be less full of water and more dense in flavor.

From green strawberry fields to licorc-y strawberry candy, these are all scents I’ve known and loved.

• Amicus Cumulous - Pearfat

• Fraaagola Saalaaata - Hilde Soliani

• Strawberry Candle - Malin + Goetz

• Oishii Berry Body Wash - Iota