Foodlore Library

Gift of Strawberries                                   photos by Samantha Archer & Kimberly Huyett

It’s a perfect baby photo, at once cute and tender and telling. She’s standing barefoot on the rhododendron-ringed driveway of her grandparents’ house, wearing a pale blue dress her mother has made. Her baby-blond hair is a soft mess of curls. She’s leaning eagerly forward with her mouth open, Catholic-communion-like, intent upon the perfect red strawberry that an elderly, walnut-brown hand is offering. My aunt held the camera, my grandfather held the berry. The chubby-legged child is me, barely walking but already deeply in the throes of my lifelong strawberry love.

My first birthday cake, a family legend goes, was a bowl of strawberries topped with a single candle. The confluence of my May birthday and the health-conscious childhood diet my mom enforced for me and my younger brother quickly made this first “cake” into a lasting tradition. Now, not a birthday goes by for me without those bright-red, heart-shaped berry slices staining my celebratory shortcake or cheesecake or ice cream with their sweet red juice. The beginning of local strawberry season is a thing I look forward to the way other people wait for the Superbowl.

I’m not alone in my red-fingered joy. We’re blessed in the Northwest by a climate that lends itself to all manner of berry cultivation. Strawberries grow well enough, in fact, to inspire no less than three annual festivals in their honor in Western Oregon alone. The oldest of these was started in 1909 in Lebanon, Oregon, a city of 13,000 residents located 90 miles south of Portland. Every year, the Lebanon Strawberry Festival creates the “World’s Largest Strawberry Shortcake,” a feat requiring 273 pounds of flour, sixty-four dozen eggs, and over a gallon of vanilla.

Attempts at grandness don’t come easy. The massive dessert has to be baked in hundreds of small sheet pans in the big ovens of local grocery stores, and then assembled into a three-tired masterpiece weighing in at around 5,700 pounds. After the shortcake (carefully wrapped in plastic) is wheeled through town as the star of the festival parade, it is sliced into more than 15,000 pieces, topped with 3,000 pounds of sliced berries and buckets of whipped cream, and served free to the festival’s attendees.

Strawberry Days mom and son: Photo by Jenie Skoy. June 2009.

As a true community affair, the festival’s organizers want to make sure everyone gets a piece of the strawberry-topped goodness: according to their website, “About 1,000 pieces are set aside and delivered to people who are unable to get out to the parade, including residents of The Oaks and Willamette Manor, patients at Lebanon Community Hospital, and those on duty at the fire and police stations.”

(on right: Jen Hardin-Utley enjoys a piece of cake!)

Rows of Strawberry Shortcake: At the 100th anniversay of Strawberry Days in Lebanon, Oregon. June, 2009.

Strawberry festivals also take place every June in St. Paul and Silverton, Oregon. I remember swirling in zany circles with my brother to the sound of a bluegrass band at one of those Silverton festivals when I was a kid. We were happily sticky-fingered from the big plates of shortcake we’d just polished off under the sheltering roof of a big barn-turned community center. Strawberries were reason for celebration, not just in my family, but for the world at large.

Shortcake might lose the title of “most American dessert” to the ubiquitous apple pie, but few can argue that it’s a close second. When the first colonists arrived on the shores of the New World in the 17th century, they discovered Native Americans cooking with a familiar food: the strawberry. Native people mixed the berries into a cornmeal bread dough, which may have been the colonists’ original inspiration for our favorite summer dessert. 

Cakes made with shortening can be traced back to Shakespeare’s England, and recipes would have made the trip with the settlers. However, true shortcake, made from a dense, sweet biscuity dough leavened with baking powder, has been wildly popular in the U.S. since the Civil War. It can be topped with any manner of summer fruit (colonial Americans favored blueberries), but today the sweet, juicy strawberry remains shortcake’s best and most frequent friend.

When paired with shortcake, vanilla ice cream, or whipped cream, strawberries seem innocent, summery and simple. But when served with chocolate or champagne, those same red fruits take on a decidedly more romantic sensibility. In ancient times, the strawberry was associated with Venus, the Roman goddess of love, because of their heart shape and red color. The French considered strawberries a potent aphrodisiac, and French newlyweds were served strawberries or a chilled strawberry soup.

The berry’s bountiful covering of seeds also gave rise to a use of the fruit as a symbol of fertility. Those 200 tiny yellow seeds, however, are a biologic marvel as well as a potent icon. The strawberry is the only common fruit to display its dry seeds, called achenes, on the outside of its flesh. The seeds, not the berries themselves, are the true “fruit” of the strawberry, while the edible red body is in actuality the enlarged ovary of the plant. In botanical terms, this means that the strawberry is not a true berry at all, but an “accessory fruit,” as are the peach, the green bean, and the sunflower seed.

Spending summer afternoons in my grandfather’s abundant garden, I learned the secrets of strawberry cultivation. The man had more than green thumbs; he was green to the elbows, and his berries grew up sweet and abundant. The berry he offered in that baby picture was surely one of his own, homegrown, freshly-plucked, and still warm from the Oregon summer sun. It was a rare summer day when, arriving at my grandparents’ house, he didn’t have a margarine container filled with berries waiting in the fridge to offer to visiting grandchildren’s eager mouths.

Like all good gardeners, Grandpa never ceased from experimenting. His strawberries grew in raised beds for a while, and then were relocated to a sandy hillside where the full afternoon sun plumped and swelled the red fruit. He tried out some new method each year of screening the growing plants from the birds, who were always eager to pirate the ripening fruit. The resulting contraptions of wood and nylon screening were odd-looking, but they got the job done: we ate more berries than the neighborhood crows. He was thrilled by the Everbearing plants that would assure him ripe berries from May until October, so long as the temperamental Northwest skies cooperated. The resulting berries were smaller, sweeter, more delicate than the big sturdy pale California variety in the grocery store.

We have a French spy to thank for all these modern strawberry varieties. The story goes that in the early 18th century, a French army officer named Amedée Francois Frezier was sent to spy on the Spanish fort in Concepcion, Chile. Whether or not he was a good spy is lost to history, but luckily for all of us, Frezier was a curious and eager botanist. The soldier discovered wild strawberries in the area which were less tasty than the ones he knew from home, but were of a size and sturdiness unknown in Europe. He took a number of strawberry plants on the ship back to France with him, and nursed them carefully through the six-month voyage home. Most of the plants died, but a lucky or unusually hardy five survived.    

When he arrived back in France in 1714, the wild Chilean strawberries were cross-bred with a sweeter but more delicate variety from Virginia. The resulting berries were a perfect blend of taste and size, and a symbolic marriage of the Americas. By 1750, those five original Chilean plants had changed the course of strawberry cultivation, and all modern plants are descended from those few lucky ancestors.

My grandfather is in good company when it comes to an adoration of strawberry cultivation. Thomas Jefferson had no less than four varieties in his gardens at Monticello, and kitchen gardeners across the country save room in their beds for the veiny green leaves and cheerful white flowers of strawberry plants. Of course, here in the Northwest the next wave of strawberry innovation will come on the organic arena, as farms and gardens work to grow beautiful berries in a sustainable way.

There’s evidence at my local farmers’ market to indicate some farms are well on their way. On a May morning, while most of the stalls were filled with early spring harvests of lettuce, green onions, and radishes, one farm’s bounty of bright red berries drew the market’s biggest and most eager crowd. Groundwork Organics, a Junction City, Oregon, outfit had for sale that morning boxes overflowing with plump scarlet fruit with their perky hulls still field-fresh and green. From ten paces you could smell the berries’ delicate, sun-warned aroma. It was heavenly, and everyone around me eagerly purchased pint after pint to carry home.

To my right, a familiar scene was taking place. A small dark-haired girl in a pink dress eagerly opened her mouth to taste the big bright berry her mother was offering. I smiled down at the strawberry-loving club’s newest initiate, and then joined the crowd at the farm’s stand, ready to take home my own little trove of sweet summer perfection.