Strawberries small in size, big for flavor
One of the films I recall seeing in theaters with my parents during my youth was the 1981 classic “On Golden Pond” when I was 11 years old.
It was originally a play on Broadway in 1979, when actress Jane Fonda purchased the rights to the story. She gave it as a gift for her father, Henry Fonda, to play the lead opposite Katherine Hepburn, with Jane also cast as their daughter who is eager to reconnect with her parents.
The movie earned the best actor Oscar for Henry and best actress Oscar for Hepburn, who on the first day of filming, gave Henry the “lucky hat,” of her late love Spencer Tracy to calm any worries he had about returning to the big screen. He wore the hat in the film.
A key opening scene in both the play and movie is about wild strawberries.
The parent characters, played by Fonda and Hepburn, are a retired couple who spend their summers at their northern New England lake cottage. Norman Thayer, 10 years older than his wife, is concerned about his memory as he prepares to welcome his 80th birthday at the start of July. Wife Ethel sends him to walk to the end of their lane to pick wild strawberries at the edge of the woods “along the Old Town Road,” so she can serve the berries with shortcake at lunch.
While picking, Norman loses track of his whereabouts and becomes momentarily panicked in the wooded landscape, before finding his way back to their cottage with an empty berry pail. As Norman explains, wild strawberries are small and not easy to pick.
Crushed and with some sugar added, they lend themselves to something as simple as a small tart or even for a couple shortcakes served for dessert as planned by Ethel Thayer in “On Golden Pond.”
But for pies or a batch of jam, it would be a tedious task to gather the needed amount. We have plenty of wild strawberries that grow along the “old railroad tracks” that divide our fields at the farm.
When I asked my dad, Chester, about whether Grandma Potempa ever picked or used wild strawberries, he said she never needed to since she always had her own strawberry patch in our farm gardens.
Like cultivated strawberries, wild strawberries and their fragrant white blossoms, are part of the same botanical family as roses. As far back as 5,000 years ago in Europe, the leaves of wild strawberries would be boiled to make a tea thought to have antiaging properties. Small, round and quite seedy, wild strawberries were gathered from forests and prized by the ancient Romans, and later, hailed in France as a sweet delicacy, sprinkled with sugar and splashed with a bit of cream.
Mary Beth Schultz, of Valparaiso, shared with me her recipe for an easy and scrumptious strawberry tart that is colorful and inviting to serve for the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
Mary Beth was a finalist in the 42nd annual Pillsbury Bake-Off in 2006 in Orlando, Florida, which is why she favors Pillsbury ready-made sugar cookie dough for the crust. Schultz, a registered nurse and mother of two daughters, is also is the executive director of The Caring Place in Valparaiso, a women’s shelter for survivors of domestic violence, who celebrate and value their own path to new independence every day.