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| For centuries, strawberries have been the most highly prized soft fruit. A sixteenth century enthusiast, on tasting his first strawberry, summed up their eternal appeal: "Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless He never did". Nowadays, greenhouse-grown strawberries are available all year round, but these fruits are at their seductive best when grown outdoors. |
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 Cultivated strawberries derive from the small wild fraises des bois, tiny fragrant woodland fruits that grow in all temperate countries and which were transplanted into kitchen gardens as early as Roman times. By the fourteenth century, the French had become strawberry enthusiasts, but it was another hundred years before the first bowls of strawberries and cream were served in England, at a banquet given by Cardinal Wolsey in 1509.
 The cultivated strawberries we enjoy so much today were developed in the nineteenth century from small scarlet wild strawberries from Virginia. These were crossed with the larger yellow Chilean pine strawberries, which the aptly named French Captain Frezier (the French word for strawberry being fraise) had brought to Brittany in 1712. Once the berfect balance of flavour and size had been achieved, enthusiasm for cultivated strawberries blossomed and they remain one of the world's favourite fruits. |
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