berry berry good

far flung foraging

I was reading

Will Cooper

’s substack the other day and he mentioned wild strawberries (‘fraises sauvages’ as a French sea captain once corrected me…I had thought they were called ‘fraises des bois’. Silly me. What would I know.)

Reading William’s words my nose was fairly tingling as it recalled the scent of these magical berries…it only takes a passing mention of these tiny fragrant flavour bombs to have me falling into the rabbit hole of reverie, from which I am attempting to scrabble out.

Bear with me.

My very first memories of this delicious fruit are from visiting my great-aunt Ilse in Widdersberg in 1962 when I was three years old. (I’ve written about her before, as the maker of stars, binder of books and possibly the world’s worst cook.)

She was a master bookbinder who (in addition to making folded stars and a multitude of other things from paper) developed a method for cold-printing leaves and flowers on to paper in the 1940s, and was prepared to teach me such magic by taking me on as her book-binding apprentice when I was visiting her while travelling Europe on three months leave due to post-bushfire stress, but it all came to nothing when I was pressured to return to Australia, my mother was insisting I be present for the “first Christmas in the rebuilt house” and then once I was back on the big island and my employer keen to have me back, it all came to nothing. So here we are. I might have happily spent my life slow-printing (it’s a process that takes six-months) fly-leaves and cover for books and never wrapped a leaf in cloth, so perhaps its as well.

But I have a glorious memory of a warm sunny late summer morning, and being sent up the lightly wooded hill path to the farm with the golden-brown meadow-scented cows, past a wooden sty with very friendly piggies (it’s all expensive houses now) to fetch the milk in a can, and stopping to stuff my face with strawberries on the way. Three-year olds were given much more licence then. My very young mother whose own experience was that of taking the cows out to pasture in Latvija at the same age was not at all concerned for me, it seems. How times have changed.

The next time I consciously encountered fragaria vesca was in Tante Rose’s garden in Göttingen, in 1969 where they had allowed themselves to be slightly tamed and lurked under the beech trees, though they must also have been in my great-grandmother’s garden (also in 1962), the one that was acquired and bulldozed by the university in order to construct a car park. Some people have no souls. There were never many berries in Tante Rose’s garden though, as the wee red squirrels were earlier risers than we were, and got the best ones first.

Skip to 1974, when my mother brought back one dried strawberry from her first visit to Latvija, pressed into her diary. Back then there was very little control over plant matter being brought into Australia, but as I was working at David Thomson Rare Plants at the time, David and I propagated the seeds in one of his glass houses, at least monitoring the tiny plants for signs of disease before they were released into the world. They adapted extraordinarily well to the climate at Mount Lofty, happily colonising a gravelly patch at the corner of the house and producing sufficient berries to add flavour to bowls of “commercial” strawberries. Unfortunately they didn’t survive the bushfire of 1983 and never reappeared.

Then there was a summer spent in Tirol, in a hidden valley between Kufstein and the Bavarian border. Pa was guest-lecturing four days a week at the university in München, and bowed to pressure from my mother and me who were keen to be somewhere rural. So he commuted to us for weekends while we lived in two rooms in the attic of an ancient farmhouse near Hinterthiersee. Our “kitchen kit” comprised an electric frying pan, a pasta machine (my father’s newly acquired toy!)¹ and a coffee machine. My parents slept in one room, my brother and I plus, for a while, also my cousin (with whom I had to share a bed) in the other.

Ma and I would get up at dawn (4am at midsummer, as I recall ) to harvest wild strawberries. We picked enough to make three small pots of jam, labelling it “magic potion”. It was carefully carried home to Australia (duly inspected by customs and quarantine) where we made it last for several years, ceremonially consuming a smidge on the end of a teaspoon each when our spirits needed lifting.

That was also the year my mother was given a recipe for strawberry ice-cream by one of her German friends. Essentially it reads “squash a punnet of strawberries with some sugar, mix with whipped cream and freeze”. It was ok when made with the sort of stuff that passes for cream in German supermarkets but when made back here in Oz using cream from the local dairy it was awful. Their very rich cream left congealed butterfat stuck to the palate and the tongue after consumption. Not recommended. (If you’re reading in Australia and want to make strawberry ice-cream, make it with crême pat instead.)

Ma’s own strawberry shortcake, was another matter. The pastry was made from my great-grandmother’s “Mürbeteig” recipe :: 300g flour, 200g butter, 100g sugar, salt + one egg; all pounded together until it became a malleable mix, pressed into a cake tin and baked blind. Once cool she arranged hulled strawberries inn a circular pattern, sloshed a sweet gelatinous mix over the top and served it about half an hour later with lashings of whipped cream.²

I didn’t encounter strawberries in the wild again until I was in Latvija for a residency at Zvartava³ in the summer of 2001. There were a dozen or so other artists who had also been invited to live and work for a fortnight in the glorious 1881 Manor house belonging to the Latvian artists union, two hours north of Riga. We were fed and cared for by a couple of local women who cooked exactly as my late grandmother did (absolute heaven!), and between our various makings (all textile based) wandered about happily in the surrounding woods and fields. There were a scant few hours of dusk but I don’t think I slept much, making the most of my time there. I didn’t have the equipment for cooking bundles so made blue ice-flower dyes from the abundance of dark purple columbines (aquilegia) that grew there, stitching a quilt from the samples. On the morning of my flight home I left the quilt spread under an archway of the city wall, where there was evidence of someone sleeping rough. I hope they found it useful.

Wild strawberries are survivors, growing in forest clearings and on gravel paths, even on walls (perhaps deposited by a passing bird), inching their way along by sending out long runners that feel around for a handhold and then carefully insert roots into available spaces. They seem to be able to adapt to all sorts of climates, tolerating extreme heat as well as cold. In Europe they’ll berry happily from about the end of May until the first frost. Somebody once told me they were a forest weed pest in Aotearoa - New Zealand, having been introduced there by Latvian refugees after the 39-45 war, but I have not been able to substantiate that from available weed lists.⁴

Strawberries growing on the walls of the lane that led down to the Tay from the studio where I used to teach in Newburgh, Scotland. I used to try and let them sit in a bowl for at least a day, sniffing it from time to time. So good.

In Latvija you’ll find them growing right up to the edge of the Baltic Sea.

Which just goes to show they are indeed magical.

Which berry makes your heart sing ?

1. It was a long time before I would eat pasta again after that summer

2. I’ve modified it a bit, browning the butter (and slinging in a whole packet, what’s an extra 50g between friends?). I use muscovado sugar instead of white and leave away the egg-white, adding a little cream to the yolk for less bouncy pastry. I also add a schmier of strawberry jam on the shortcake base once it has cooled, and eschew the chemical cocktail of Ma’s go-to topping (Dr Oetker macht’s möglich 😏) using potato flour with a mix of water, sugar and blitzed strawberries instead.

3. https://www.zvartavaspils.lv/

4. I’ve found them growing in nothofagus forests on the South Island!