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The Mast-Head: Stawberry Shortfake

Wed, 06/19/2019 - 12:29

‘Driscoll’s.” That was Ad­elia’s one-word answer in a blind taste test of strawberries bought locally on Sunday. By then, I had already had three quarts of them boiling in the preserving kettle. The cliché about commerce is you get what you pay for. This weekend, I learned that lesson yet again. 

Having not made strawberry jam for a few years, despite my annually repeated intentions, I vowed this spring to do so. Picking up a bundle of rhubarb at Quail Hill sealed my plan.

Early Sunday, driving east on the main road, I noticed a sign reading something like, “Happy Father’s Day. $6 strawberry qt.” 

“Hot damn!” I thought. “They are $9 at Balsam.” Not much later I learned why.

The girls and I drove back later that morning and picked out three quarts and a pint of blueberries to eat on the ride. The woman behind the counter handed me a cardboard flat to carry away our haul. 

Without my reading glasses on, or perhaps distracted by kidding around with my daughters, I did not pay attention to the logo on the side of the box. But once home and on the kitchen counter, there it was, staring at me as if to say, “You cheap bastard.” Driscoll’s, grown in California.

I looked again at the strawberries, which by then I had washed and begun de-stemming; Something did not look right.

For those readers who are unfamiliar with Driscoll’s strawberries, these are supermarket-durable, most­ly a monochromatic bright red, hard to the touch, and not entirely bad eating. But compared to an East End fresh strawberry, buh-dum-dum, no comparison. 

Lisa walked over. “Those are Dris­coll’s,” she said, taking a glance. It being Father’s Day, I asked if she would pick up three actual local quarts on her way back from some errands later. Then I set a few of the Driscoll’s aside for further examination and tossed the rest into the jam kettle. The Quail Hill rhubarb I held back for a second batch. 

Lisa returned an hour later with three boxes of richly colored, tender, fragrant berries. Real, local berries. These got the honor of stewing down with the Quail Hill rhubarb.

Social media was swift and not kind. “They’ve been doing it for years!” someone declared. Another spoke of doubt about the “loads of pumpkins in the fall that ‘suddenly’ appear on the fields at ‘certain’ places.” Several suggested that I try the North Fork. One wisenheimer on Facebook said, “You are supposed to bring the reusable bags, duh!” 

The nihilist and punker artist Peter Dayton nailed it, however: “Nothing is real,” he wrote. As in the Beatles song, “Strawberry Fields Forever.” (I didn’t get it at first, either.) 

We all realize that demand at farm stands can outstrip supply sometimes, and that East End produce is by necessity supplemented by stuff grown on the North Fork or elsewhere in the region. But unless the sign says “California strawberries,” a farm-stand customer buying in peak  season is going to assume the berries hadn’t traveled 3,000 miles.

That’s all I have to say about the great strawberry caper at this point. I have held back on naming the farm stand until I can catch it in the act. I’ll report back when I crack the first jar of jam.


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