Strawberries, and the Race Against the Weather
June this year was wet in a way that made the strawberries difficult. It rained on four days out of the first ten, and then it rained again in the afternoons for a week, so the fruit lay in damp soil and picked up a smell of green before it was ever picked. The first rows gave us almost nothing. We ate the thin, watery ones quickly and moved on.
What survived was on the far edge of the patch, where the ground slopes and the water runs off, and those berries were smaller and darker and far sweeter than the fat ones. The rain made them small. Concentration of flavour, my mother says, which is her way of saying that bad weather can help a fruit if the fruit is stubborn enough. She also says that about people, usually about me.
Then there was the batch that went wrong. We picked a large tray on the one dry morning, carried it in, and put half of it straight into a pan for jam. The fruit had been sitting in the wet before we picked it, so it carried its own water into the pan, and the jam turned out thin and pale and never set, even after an extra long boil. It is still in the fridge, and it is still not jam. My mother calls it strawberry drink, which is generous.
So we changed two things. We pick only after two dry days, and we never wash the berries before the jam, because the water on them is the water we want. This year we made three small jars, proper ones, with the fruit dark and the set firm, and we have already given one away to Elena's teacher, who asked what was in it.