Edible San Francisco

Spring. Barely perceptible lime-green leaves push out of naked tree limbs, blossoms explode, rain comes in blasts, tiny pale petals glide, sticking to surfaces like light snow, releasing their subtle but oily perfume into the air. Light shifts from winter white to pale yellow.



As soon as I see these changes, smudges of visual trickery, I think about fruit I've been missing since it was last warm. I daydream about strawberries, what I would make with them, how I would savor them, how happy they'd make me. I let myself be filled with strawberry stories.

Two years ago this spring my mother stood in the kitchen doorway, a wide smile across her beaming face, and asked me an existential question about some small red berries in her refrigerator.



"How could it be that you've just brought me the best strawberries I've ever had in my life? How could that be?"



Admittedly, she had well-earned fruit eating credentials, having eaten lot of strawberries in her sixty plus years. But today she was ebullient about this particular brown paper bag full of Swanton berries I'd given her. The answer, silent, almost visible, trembled in the air between us, unspoken. Her taste buds had recently been indelibly affected by innumerable rounds of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. My mother and I knew she was at the end of her life. The sensual relationship she had with fruit was changing rapidly and inexorably, but in that one moment, she was as happy as the taste sensation itself.



Although my mother's question was one without answer, it's the very one people asked the first time they crouched down in the woods, whether on European soil or in the Americas, to eat strawberries, these small, seedy, pale pink and white fruits.



The berry we eat today is an amalgamation, like many other cultivated edible plants, of the fruit's characteristics we've embraced and discarded over time. The strawberry's flavor, and scent is a multidimensional idea, concrete and philosophical, historical and sexual, manufactured and inherent.



In Fruit A Connoisseur's Guide and Cookbook (Mitchell Beazley Publishers, 1991), Alan Davidson and Charlotte Knox illuminate a fact known by few when they state, "The strawberry, the fruit of the plants of the genus Fregaria, has a peculiar and unique structure. It is technically known as a false or accessory fruit. The seeds which, unlike those of any other fruit, are on the outside, are the true fruits of the plant."



And David Karp, America's famous fruit detective, elaborates in the article Berried Treasure at Smithsonian.com in the Science and Technology section. "The hormones produced by fertile seeds, are needed for proper development of the strawberry."



Mr. Karp's article is about horticulturalist Jan Swartz "attempting to breed a strawberry unlike any tasted in the United States for more than a centuryÉ Fragaria moschata, the musk strawberry, the most aromatic strawberry of all."