Ameer Kotecha

In praise of British strawberries

  • From Spectator Life
Illustration: Natalia Yanez-Stiel

Ask a foreigner to name the fruit that above all others epitomises their image of Britain, and it will surely be the strawberry. It is less a fruit than an icon. Redolent of royalty: not just for its role jam sandwiching together a Victoria Sponge but for its colour too, as patriotically red as the tunics of The Queen’s Guards. To eat bowls of strawberries and cream at Wimbledon. To partake of a punnet on a park picnic. These things are as quintessentially British as tea and queuing.

What is it that is so evocative about strawberries? They are of course synonymous with summer, and they have about them something of the match tea, of outdoor eating and of holidays. There is nostalgia too: growing up without strawberry jam sandwiches was surely no childhood at all. They feel like a very egalitarian fruit: while a few posh kids might grow up with a taste for blueberries and loganberries, everyone knows what a strawberry tastes like. The timing of their arrival adds to the anticipation: the appearance of home-grown strawberries on shelves heralds the proper start of the British fruit season after so many months of cold and wet and dreaded kiwis.

Even setting aside the food miles, I find there is something particularly deplorable about getting a non-British strawberry, when the home-grown ones are so superior. Wait until May for the early season British fruit, grown under cover. They will often get better as the season goes on and they have had time enough to soak up the sun. Thanks largely to the breeding of new cultivars by the East Malling Research centre in Kent – the epicentre of strawberry production – the traditional six-week UK strawberry season is now far longer, so we can gorge with abandon throughout the summer: on Symphony and Sweet Eve, on Sallybright and Judibell, or – as the special bank holiday weekend approaches – on Jubilee (first

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