One of the sadnesses of modern life is that it is so difficult to get proper ripe fruit to eat if you rely on shops as your main source of supply.
Despite what they tell you fruit does not ripen after a few days sitting in the fruit bowl even if it is perched on a sunny window sill; it will do little better if you can actually put it outside directly under the sunshine (if we ever get any). Sure it will get soft, but it will never get really juicy or the sugars properly developed & the perfume never scents the room. I am left to conclude that either something about the chilled storage irreparably interferes with the ripening process, or that the fruit has to be left attached to its parent to achieve this successful transition.
I do not expect to be able to repeat under a grey European sky the sinfully sensuous pleasure of using my teeth to tear the skin off a mango fresh from the tree, with the perfume in my nostrils & the juice trickling down my chin, but surely we can manage ripe strawberries?
(Actually I was off even real luscious juicy strawberries for several years; the chateau at which I spent the summer as an au pair had extensive strawberry beds & it was strawberries twice a day, lunch & dinner. I thought I never wanted to eat another after that, but I got over it eventually).
Seems not. After years of the wrong sort of strawberry tart for pudding, this year the idea suddenly came – why not use them for savoury salads. After all, with the sourness, they are not all that far removed from tomatoes in flavour as well as in colour, & we already know that strawberries & black pepper work really well even as a dessert.
And they do work remarkably well in savoury salads. So far we have tried them with cucumber (not so revolutionary for anyone familiar with the idea of Pimms) & courgette. They also work well with slightly spicy leaves, such as rocket, or even watercress. They are a gorgeous addition to a new potato salad (creamy dressing, not mayonnaise), work well with crisp sliced green peppers or, real revelation this, thinly sliced red onion.
