Strawberry, usually no more than a pictorial temptation for a city dweller, appeared live in the roads of Panchgani, Mahabaleshwar. With countless hawkers dotting the curvaceous roads with heaps of strawberry picked locally, you cannot but stop your vehicle to devour this cute-looking fruit. The crisp chillness in the air gave way for the aroma of the red fruit to engulf the atmosphere. They are sold in cartons; with a kilo costing just about `200. Every fruit in the heap had a green crown adorning its top. For a person like me who lives in Chennai, both the taste and the fruit remained elusive until then. By the time it reaches us down south, the fruit looks deprived of its splash of redness and is very often just a sour piece of flesh. It is occasionally available in small, fragile plastic boxes that are expensive.
Strawberries wedded to cream are a decadent indulgence in every sense. No sane person would want to miss this delightful experience of downing some sliced strawberries with dollops of whipped cream! While relishing them with cream is one method, eating the fruit just the way it is, is quite another. There is palpably just one way to do this: hold the fruit by its crown (stem) and bite it gently to get a wholesome feel. No strawberry shake can match the juices that ooze out of the fresh fruit.
Unlike other fruits, the strawberry has its seeds on the outside—on an average there are 200 tiny seeds in every berry! The very name was derived from a 19th Century practice (and still today, although most farms use raised beds, enclosed in plastic) of placing straw around the growing berry plants to protect the ripening fruit. Upon visiting one of the farms, we found that the fruit is grown in thermocol pots to shield it from the weather.
It takes about four to six weeks for the plant to bear fruit and every pot can yield up to 1kg of strawberries. Every plant is hand-picked approximately every three days. This is the time it takes the berries to complete their cycle of turning from green to white to red.
Strawberries contribute to an eclectic range of sensory treatment in terms of lip balms, jams, ice creams, milkshakes, oats, pastries, face-washes and moisturising creams: strawberry flavour is easily available; making us accustomed to a certain visual imagery about the fruit. We are merely confined to its “essence” most of the time, oblivious about the taste of the fresh fruit. Visiting a strawberry farm adds life to the mundane flavours that we are trained to taste. You become one with the strawberry; the sprightly red beckons you with all its charm.
For a lingering treat of the red fruit, we purchased a good quantity and flew it down with us; the result was a suitcase full of clothes smelling of these lovely berries in our Chennai home.