SC - Strawberries

[Christina M. Krupp]

Greetings! 

Yes, strawberries are "period" (whatever you construe that to mean!) and,
more importantly, we do have several good recipes showing their use in
mainstream medieval Europe. 

However, allow me to qualify and elaborate on that statement a bit. Our
twentieth-century strawberries aren't the same as medieval ones (as is the
case with so many fruits and vegetables!)

Before contact with the New World, the European Strawberry was a tiny, 
tasty, seedy fruit, not much bigger than our wild strawberries or field 
strawberries -- the ones that are about a third to a half an inch in 
diameter. 

The settlers of the Virginia colonies discovered a New World variant of 
the strawberry, still small, having different virtues. Botanists tried to 
cross-breed the two types, with no success. Then, in 1712, a third type 
of strawberry was discovered in Peru, and brought back to England. It 
was larger, yellowish, and had a pineapple scent. The British 
experimented with growing these to the size of eggs! 

Finally, a Frenchman named Duchesne managed to crossbreed the Chilean
strawberry (Fragaria chiloensis) with the Virginia strawberry (F. 
virginiana), and that forms the basis for the large, red strawberries we
see in supermarkets today (Fragaria ananassa). 

(I think that our tiny wild field strawberries are a better match to
medieval strawberries than those monstrous tasteless grocery-store
berries. And, since it's almost strawberry season here in Vermont, I'm
going out to pick some next week -- yum!)

Information is from:
Sokolov, Raymond: Why we eat what we eat, how the encounter between the 
New World and the Old changed the way everyone on the planet eats. New 
York: Summit Books, 1991. 

Countess Marieke van de Dal
Mountain Freehold
East Kingdom