STRAWBERRY SEASON: PICK YOUR OWN FLASHBACK (and Brown Sugar Ice Cream with Strawberry-Rhubarb Compote)

My sister and I grew up picking fruit--we weren’t migrant workers, but we developed a joint-popping, sun-burnished savviness for each crop and season; we knew our way around. My father’s cousins in St. Louis had a farm and there were treks out there, an orchard. My grandmother was seemingly always back from a walk down the mountain, or abruptly stopping the car and disappearing down an embankment, returning cradling blackberries from some secret copse of hers in a hammock made of her shirt-tails or her palms. And it seemed a summer of picnics, adventures and crabbing couldn't officially start without strawberry-picking. When it comes to strawberries, it’s Pick Your Own Flashback.

Most immediately, it speaks to me of the wonderful, structured, yearning things my father did with us on weekends, before it was “really okay” for divorced dads to just “hang out” with their kids during visitation. It’s why today I have a fondness for college lacrosse, astronaut ice-cream, museum-quality air-conditioning, marble and paper documents. He might have splayed on the burnt-orange shag rug while we girls diligently tried to watch a Terps game with him (nodding out on roughly four occasions per year for a total of 37 minutes of desperately needed sleep), but he spent real time with us, and this is a very good thing.

A strawberry-picking memory smells of Coppertone, dirt, jet-fuel (possibly the same day or merely stored on the same synapse as the memory for a Blue Angels air show), and the half-eaten fruit cast off by some wasteful picker before us, crushed underfoot and now picked up by a slight wind. It sounds like a stake-body truck bumping down a dirt road and echoing over the ruts, a tractor starting up and vibrating in the distance, a strawberry hull twisting and suck-popping out of its body with your teeth. Picking is a gentle tug, the exact pressure needed to get a berry off the vine without crushing it. It’s dusty hair parting, bringing a warm berry almost subconsciously to your lips with stained fingers, a little grit.

Strawberry memories also include the post-picking events, invariably involving the current blond incarnation of “my father’s girlfriend.” Now happily re-married for many years, he cut a dashing Magnum PI-esque swath through the late 70's/early 80's (including the heart of my 4th grade teacher, who was not blonde but looked exactly like Crystal Gayle). We shared him on these weekends, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes sufficiently distracted by the mysteries of a new, skyline apartment, the not-my-motherness, the grown-up things we were allowed to do as my father attempted to meld an adult life with that of a parent (which I now have great respect for, for all of us). So I have dribs and drabs of canning knowledge--but not enough I won’t have to Google this year--based on these intersections with grown-ups, my sister and I running in and out of the festive atmosphere of the kitchen, high on natural fruit sugars. I see strawberries plunked in a glass of champagne, buoying up, fizzing. A black and white speckled enamelware pot simmering with Mason jars. Pectin (what the hell is pectin? I remember thinking). A lethal pan of hot melted wax, terra-cotta colored rubber seals. Matte, brown-pink foam skimmed from the top of the gurgling pot with a wide metal spoon, a job I desperately wanted. I hear a sliding glass door open 30 floors up from traffic, and Ella Fitzgerald coming out of tall brown fabric-covered speakers. Metal jar tops being spun down and closed tight on the jam, with the dizzying strength of my father's huge hands.

So picking strawberries means many things to me, but it never occurred to me to be fearful. Today I have four apple trees, a pear tree, a gaggle of blackberry and mulberry bushes, a towering cherry tree. I have two small children and a 5-minute drive to an enormous pick-your-own farm. And I have a moms’ group—GOD LOVE THEM--that has recently been “concerned” about and “discussing” the pesticides potentially used at local PYOs.

We never had these concerns. The words "organic" and "free-range" were still distant. The extent of the"fear" instilled in me regarding food came from My Mother, the Realist (My Father was off pulling a Ferdinand-the-Bull, smelling flowers and possibly eating them, in addition to unknown nuts, berries and grasses). She uttered darkly glittering terms like “ptomaine”, “ salmonella” and even the simple, dazzling word “poison,” as she made a circular attack toward the chicken-ghosts on her cutting boards and countertops with a non-abrasive powder containing bleach (the smell of which still makes me feel safe, purified, despite what I know).

"Green" wasn't a movement or way of life!--it was simply an indicator of ripeness, a color to be healthily respected. The most sinister thing I ever considered with regard to picking fruit (before the moms’s group conversation) was The Dreaded Mullygrubs. She would shake her head as I ate another green apple and say, “Okay, that’s the 5th one. [Shrug] You’re digging your own grave, Yorick. You’ll the get The Mullygrubs.” painting: Franz Hals "Youth With a Skull"

I never had to ask her to explain that term. My Mother had a way of setting a term or phrase on the table, leaving no ambiguity, even if you could have no possible way of knowing what she was talking about (also, I think it’s instinctive among animals and humans--even small children--to be wary of copious amounts of possibly unripe fruit). I knew what I was risking. It didn’t stop me then (and it doesn’t stop me now). The Mullygrubs: that was the worst you could do to yourself or your offspring picking strawberries.

It was the first picking trip of the season the other day, the first tractor ride out to the field, first squat in the rows, first time brushing strawberry-leaves aside to expose every red gem. “Okay people," I said, handing out boxes, "we are looking for the red-reds.” Color-blind, or just impatient, two year-old Huck ate his impetutous share of berries with pink-to-white tips. The end with absolutely no color there yet, like a thumb pressing down hard on your palm, a whiteness devoid of juice. And still there were plenty of ripe berries, we ate so many, dark-red juices running down all our wrists. Both my kids stopped at exactly the same moment, and looked up at me with complete awe, looked down the rows of fruit, looks that said, "All this, for me??!! You're kidding!" I cautioned them not to step on the black plastic which keeps the plants warm, to "pick clean" by removing ripe fruit of every size, but I did not stop their hands on the way to their mouths and wash off the fruit. I didn't even consider it. And for the rest of the day, I observed them periodically squinting to the left with smiling concentration, suddenly understanding that they were remembering the trip, ferreting out endless, surprise seeds from fruit long-eaten in their new molars.

This is what I love about strawberry-picking. It can't be measured in pecks or bushels, because it's the sum total of what’s in your baskets and boxes, and everything you ate in the field--what the farmer fully expected you would eat—what you could eat. Everything you could stuff in your face, in fact. Everything you could remember. The only thing you can measure is what’s held in the ride or tired walk back from the field, before anyone weighs in. It’s an ultimately hopeful act shared by farmer, picker, grown-up and child.

Post-Picking Recipe: Brown Sugar Ice Cream with Strawberry-Rhubarb Compote

Brown Sugar Ice-Cream Recipe:
1 cup whole milk, very cold
½ C Dark Brown Sugar
1 T almond extract
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 C Whipping Cream, very cold

Beat the sugar into the milk two minutes, add extracts and whipping cream one more minute. Immediately transfer to ice-cream maker and continue with manufacturer’s directions.

I feel like this is a little white-sugar lie, if not a complete misrepresentation to say: “I made ice-cream.” I put some things together into the swirling belly of the electric Cuisinart ice-cream maker (which is on loan from my sister)—it did all the work. No rock salt, no cranking. Master a basic recipe, learn proportion, and a few quirky technique-things, and suddenly you’re the old-fashioned, double-dipping whore in the ice-cream parlor and a lady in the bedroom every man wants to meet. Once you get the basic recipe, pie in the sky’s the limit (coming in second to this is a lavender-buttermilk recipe—essentially the same recipe with white {gasp!} sugar, buttermilk over whole milk, where you soak fresh lavender to get the essence. Don’t make my first-time mistake and eagerly put fresh, chopped Hidecote leaves the first time…)

There is just too much for me to say about rhubarb—my affection for it runs as deep as the horseradish root. I have many, many rhubarb memories and its own post is due here soon. Yes, you can use this technique to make a simple strawberry compote, but you’ll rhubarb the day you dismissed this gloriously tart rhizome.

Strawberry Rhubarb Compote:

4 or 5 rhubarb stalks, scrubbed, chopped. Leaves discarded*
2 Cups strawberries, hulled, halved
One giant orange
Couple teaspoons dark brown sugar
Grated fresh ginger, if desired

Throw strawberries and rhubarb in a saucepan. Grate in some ginger root. Zest the orange into the pot. Juice the orange over the fruit. Bring to a simmer for about 5-7 minutes, stirring carefully until rhubarb is soft strands melded with the strawberries, trying to keep berries intact. Add a couple of tablespoons brown sugar and let simmer until the color deepens and it thickens up.

*Ironically, any poisonous threat of eating strawberries off the vine is offset by the very real danger of consuming rhubarb leaves, which are, simply put, toxic, whether they are treated with pesticides or not. Any resemblance to celery stops at the stalk-like appearance. These leaves do not add charming flavor, they add toxicity. The entire plant is a laxative, by the way—not lethal, but worth a warning.