When our daughter was 8 or so we began a tradition of picking strawberries at Butler’s Orchard, a commercial farm that allowed city slickers like us to get our hands dirty. Since there was no limit on how many strawberries we were allowed to pick, we just kept going until the pain in our knees told us it was time to stop. It is amazing how many strawberries you can pick in a couple of hours. I remember one year we came home with 28 pounds of berries, obviously far more than we could eat. We gifted multiple jars of the jam we made that afternoon to friends and drank a few too many daiquiris as we cooked. That year I ate so many strawberries I broke out in hives.
Using several quarts of the remaining berries we made a large batch of strawberry sherbet. The recipe we found called for double freezing, so we started it the day we went picking and finished it the following day, and had it for dessert that night. We made so much it lasted throughout the winter and into the spring when the process started all over again. We wowed friends with it when they came for dinner in the middle of the winter.
I stopped making the sherbet as Darryn lost interest in going with mom and dad to pick the berries. Of course I could have bought fresh ones at our local farmers market or bought frozen ones, but I never did. It seemed sacrilegious to divorce the making of the sherbet from the picking of the berries.
I don’t know what possessed me, but I began thinking about making the sherbet again a couple of weeks ago. I hesitated because it has both sugar and corn syrup in it, but I managed to get past the guilt by telling myself I would only be eating a little at a time. I’m glad I did because it tasted just as good as it did 40+ years ago. As with Proust’s madeleine the first spoonful brought back pleasant memories from long ago – the sweet taste of just picked strawberries and their aroma in the air. CLICK HERE TO SEE THE RECIPE