June 2019 is reminding me that I don’t live in Sicily. I live in Birmingham. High latitude, rain catching Birmingham. This is turning into one of those summers where the temperature lingers around 20 degrees, and it rains, and it rains, and it rains. This time last year we were about to leave for Alicudi and the embrace of Mediterranean heat: it was all geckos, seafood, swimming and unrelenting sun. But even in Birmingham, the sun shone kindly, cherries ripened, oyster festivals were visited, grass withered. But holidays and summer are delayed this year; instead there is rain and grey and depression.
Britain offers some consolation in one of what the Sicilian calls ‘the northern fruit’; strawberries, bringing the first of the major battles with the local pigeons and squirrels. Even in the gloom, still they ripen, needing only a few hints of blue sky to suddenly swell and blush to a deeply, sensual scarlet.
They are the most luxurious of fruits to grow. So extravagant in terms of space, maintenance and protection, offering a repayment of a fleeting two weeks of glut and gorging. The downside of last year’s holiday in the sun meant that we missed the strawberries, they came and went in the time we were away. I imagine they were incomparable last year, ripened to perfection by that mythically hot summer.
It is a sadness that strawberries have now become ubiquitous and eternal. The strawberries of shops are a poor and tortured thing, to the extent that so many people have forgotten, or worse, never tasted, the intensity of a freshly picked, perfume leaking free range strawberry; its intense blood redness is the difference between oil paints and crayons.
The downsides; to achieve fourteen days of life affirmation they need space to sprawl, and nets to ward off rapacious birds and mammals. But even nets will be stomped on and nibbled through, so accept that some will be lost. Slugs and snails adore them too, so here you must decide which preventative measure (if any) your conscience will allow. The plants, although easy to look after, don’t like to be disturbed too often, which means your strawberry patch can turn into a weed patch the moment you turn your head, but weeds can also hide some of the fruit from eagle-eyed pigeons.
I asked the Sicilian how they use strawberries at home, because I could only think of Italian gelato, granita and a little tart of custard and glazed alpine strawberries. You see punnets of these alpine berries for sale there – tiny, intense things (so, typically Sicilian), they call them Fragoline di bosco; strawberries of the forest. But he drew a blank. I asked another friend from Milan, and one from Rome, with a Sicilian partner – they too came up with the triumvirate, along with a Roman standard of strawberries, lemon juice and sugar. So perhaps then, when he calls them ‘a northern fruit’, he’s right, perhaps they thrive in our dampness, our scudding leaden skies and disappointment of British summers; they exist to guarantee us wan northerners some unqualified joy during their constrained window.
Last year I tried to bring back some of those strawberries of the forest, knowing that I would have missed my own fat Brummie versions. But they didn’t travel well. A delayed flight and three hours in the car from Stansted, turned them to mush and mould. They were a reminder that of all the crops, the strawberries are the worst to be away for, there will be no other chances until next year. They were also a reminder to make the most of the glut, to capture its essence in jams and ices, so that a spoonful can whisk you back to a moment when you were squatting, with stained fingers, searching for the stab of red beneath green, and loading up bowl after bowl with your rewards.
Strawberry and Lemon Granita (for 8-ish)
Granita in Sicily and Granita in the UK are different creatures. Both should be intensely flavoured – the essence of their ingredients. In Sicily they are fleeting and transient, melting to chilly cordial before your eyes in the summer heat. They are a shot of their parts, like a fruit espresso (or in the case of coffee granita, an actual espresso), refreshing and restorative. In the UK, particular in this summer, they retain their form for longer, but rarely is there heat strong enough to demand granita. In the heat of Sicily granita invokes an emotional as well as a physical response. Save it for sunny, warm days. It is too easy to catch a chill in this country and anyway, it works so much better when the air is a little sticky and the sun too hot, and you’re not in a grey British summer.
500g ripe as you can Strawberries
200g Sugar
Juice of one lemon
75ml (or less of water)
Remove any leaves from the strawberries, halve and cook them in a splash of water. Once they’ve disintegrated, liquidise them.
Bring the water to the boil, then add the sugar and stir until it’s all dissolved.
Take off the heat and leave to cool.
Push the liquidised fruit through a very fine sieve – fine enough to take the seeds out, and then stir your strawberries into the sugar and water. Finally add the lemon juice and stir.
Taste it. It should be Type 2 Diabetes sweet, as frozen things never taste as sweet as they do at room temperature
Now chill the mixture for a few hours and then put it in a freezer in whatever container you plan to store it in.
If you were to use an ice cream maker her, you’d get a smooth sorbet. Granita should be gritty and crystalline.
So every hour or so, take the container out of the freezer and scratch it with a fork, to get your icy grit. One frozen, it’ll keep indefinitely, but I try to make small batches for almost immediate
Once it’s ready, serve it in tiny glasses, the camper the better.
MangiaMangia 