What the world needs now is love and strawberries. In an extract from her book Eat Your Heart Out, Peta Mathias talks about the food of love - strawberries - plus a recipe.
Today we're all mad about strawberries. They were largely ignored in ancient times, as the only fruit they produced were those tiny, rather tasteless wild ones you might find as weeds. They grew in many parts of the world — from the Himalayas to America, Europe to Asia — largely overlooked.
However, the Romans noticed their heart-like shape and colour, so connected them to Venus and love (though, just to be contrary, early churches were carved with them to signify righteousness and perfection). In the 18th century new cultivars were grown, producing larger fruit with a sweet flavour that everyone fell for. Love continued to be tied to the fruit, for a saying then arose that if you split a double strawberry and gave half each to a male and a female, they would promptly fall in love with each other. If only it were that simple!
Unsurprisingly, given their link to love, strawberries belong to the rose family, rosaceae; and their botanical name Fragaria actually means fragrant. They are the only fruit that carries its seeds on the outside, so maybe they should also represent fertility given they are so overt.
Strawberries don't get any riper after picking, so it's important to pick only the bright-red ones. The deeper the colour, the sweeter the berry. If you're buying them in a shop, try to buy them the day you're going to eat them, because putting them in the fridge deadens the flavour (like most fruit, incidentally, including tomatoes). You must eat as many strawberries as possible when they are in season, because they make you happy with their high levels of depression-fighting vitamin B and keep you young and sexy forever with their antioxidants. By autumn the heart-shaped mouthfuls of red fragrance are but a drooling memory, to last only in our dreams and as jam.