It is with great pleasure that I announce this year’s strawberry season to be a real humdinger. Knowing absolutely nothing about how they are grown or their preferred climate, soil, and temperatures, I would have assumed that this cold, rainy spring would have made for peaked and watery berries. But they have been wonderful. So far I have sampled berries from Open Minded Organics in Bridgehampton (no spray!), Pike’s in Sagaponack, and from the Mattituck Strawberry Festival.
This year the Mattituck Strawberry Festival is 65 years old, like me. The festival idea was hatched in 1954 after a few members of the Lions Club visited a Florida strawberry festival and thought it was a great idea for the North Fork.
At this point, the festival goes on for four days, has fireworks, a strawberry queen, a strawberry shortcake eating contest, an “international food court,” a big, beautiful Ferris wheel, lots of rides you wouldn’t want to go on after a deep fried Oreo, hermit crabs and goldfish, glitter henna tattoos, and bird marionettes made out of feathers.
I went to the festival about 10 years ago and was somewhat disappointed to taste the strawberry shortcakes. They were made with Driscoll’s strawberries, piled on top of yellow cake (not a proper biscuit-like shortcake), and then squirted with fake whipped cream. Is it unreasonable to expect fresh local strawberries and real whipped cream? Perhaps, when you are serving thousands of people every day. Maybe this expectation is akin to assuming that every lobster roll for sale out here came from local lobsters from local waters and was steamed and shelled for you this morning. Or thinking your local rosé was made from local grapes. It is simply not possible.
This past weekend, I went back to the Mattituck Strawberry Festival to try that shortcake again and suss out the source of the Fragaria x ananassa. It was delightful to see that, yes there were crates and crates of local strawberries being sold by the quart at the entrance to the festival grounds. Further back, however, behind the tents where chocolate covered strawberries were being doled out, there were cases of Driscoll’s, most likely grown in Watsonville, Santa Maria, or Salinas, Calif., this time of year. F.Y.I., this is not horrible, Driscoll’s berries are non-G.M.O., and the company does have a line of organic berries. But when the festival chairman boasts: “Attendees come back year after year, to enjoy strawberries GROWN RIGHT HERE ON LONG ISLAND,” (my caps) I get a little burr under my saddle.
The strawberry shortcake was very good. The cake/biscuit was not too sweet and had the density needed to stand up to, and absorb, the strawberry juices. The approximately two-cup serving of whipped topping was more like Cool Whip than Reddi-Whip, which is made from real cream. Cool Whip is made with hydrogenated vegetable oil, high fructose corn syrup, various gums, and sorbates, stearates, and phosphates. I like the taste of Cool Whip.
Interestingly enough, the shortcake eating contest winner this year fell a few pounds short of last year’s winner, who managed to consume 22 pounds of strawberry shortcake in eight minutes. Now, stop reading for a moment, go find something that weighs around 22 pounds, pick it up and imagine that much weight in food going into your stomach in eight minutes. Perhaps this is why the contest was suspended for a decade. Some witnesses appreciated the irony of the sponsor’s banner hanging over the competitive eaters: Peconic Bay Medical Center.
This year’s winner, Geoffrey Esper, said that the size of the strawberries and the lack of absorption of the juices into the cake made it impossible to eat more than 17 and a half pounds in the allotted eight minutes.
Competitive eating is popular in America, Canada, and Japan. There are terms like “chipmunking,” that is cheating by stuffing your cheeks, and “reversal,” which is a nicer term for the sometimes inevitable upchuck. As I am not a fan of “reversals,” I chose instead to visit the international food court. Here I contemplated the jumbo turkey legs, Philly cheese steaks, and candied apples and wondered what made these foods “international.” Oh, wait, there are gyros, zeppolis, and funnel cakes, those are international. As an intrepid food taster I started with a deep-fried Twinkie. The gentleman who took my money asked “did you know that the Twinkie is the only food that will last 1,000 years if you keep it in the wrapper?” I pondered this fake news factoid before I reminded him that I had given him a Jackson not a five-spot and you owe me more change.
A deep-fried Twinkie is interesting, maybe even more interesting if the dough coating is cooked. The “cream” filling remains pure white and fluffy even when hot, and the golden sponge cake miraculously survives the battering, frying, and dousing with confectioner’s sugar. I didn’t really eat it; I tasted it. Next up, because I wanted to know how far down in quality and up in calories carnival food can go, I tried a paper basket full of macaroni and cheese topped with pulled pork. I took a few bites and convinced a volunteer it was delicious, please take the rest, I don’t have cooties, so that it didn’t go to waste.
So some of the strawberries were local and some were not. The baskets I bought at the entrance to the festival were definitely local and they were super sweet, deep red, and perfumy. The event was fun and trashy, more carny than small-town festival, but what the heck, the Lions Club has been sponsoring it and raising money for good deeds for 65 years now.
Our strawberry season is late this year, but it is a good one. Get these fleeting treats before they’re gone and make sure you know the source!