Food historian Susan Benjamin takes us back in time to trace the surprising history of strawberries in New England.
In Ipswich, food historian Susan Benjamin was gleeful after filling a quart of strawberries at Russell Orchards.
“Who knew these beautiful, perfect fruits actually came to us via spies and pirates and experiments and lost names that bring us back to Massachusetts?”A quart of fresh, ripe strawberries picked at Russell Orchards Apparently Amédée-François Frézier excelled at posing as somebody other than he was. He pretended to be a sea captain, and got in with the rich and mighty. “And more important for us, he got in the gardens of the rich and mighty,” Benjamin said. “And there he discovered the Chilean strawberry.” It was huge, with gorgeous red flesh — but also really disappointing. “It had zero flavor,” Benjamin said.
“Back in the U. S. in the 1800s, nobody really could figure out how to make the American strawberry with the Chilean strawberry — or any other strawberry — that was as tasty as the one in Europe,” Benjamin said. With all the intrigue, pirates, kings and spies that mark the strawberry’s past, Benjamin said there’s one more juicy conundrum related to Hovey’s hybrid.
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