By Joel Denker
The Europeans were awestruck by the wild strawberries of the New World. The berries spread their runners, taking over the forest floors and meadows. “We can not sette down foote but tred on strawberries,” one English colonist remarked.
A “pioneer species,” to use writer Peter Hatch’s phrase, this member of the rose family flourished on the soil that the Indians and the European settlers had cleared of trees and brush. “Like all wild fruits, the strawberry responded to the additional light that resulted from the disturbance of the mature forest by bearing more and larger berries on a rich carpet of leaves,” Hatch said. In time, both Europeans and Indians took the strawberries from the wild and transplanted them to their gardens.
New arrivals were stunned by the untrammeled, abundant fruit. “The land is fertile in soyle to produce all manners of plants … here are also strawberries,” an early planter wrote to King James I. “I have lien downe in one place in my corne field and in the compasse of my reach have filled my belly in the place.” Roger Williams, the founder of the Rhode Island colony, was amazed that “in some parts where the natives have planted, I have many times seen as many as would fill a good ship.”
Years later, the 20th century American critic, Lewis Mumford, tried to imagine what the thickets of berries would look like. “They grew so thick that … horses’ fetlocks seemed covered in Blood.”
The strawberry became an important form of sustenance. The Narragansett Indians in Rhode Island, who called the heart-shaped fruit, “wuttahimneash,” made bread from strawberries and cornmeal. “The Indians bruise them in a mortar and mix them with meale and make “berry bread,” Roger Williams wrote in his journal. The Native Americans also reveled in “veritable strawberry sprees, eating the delicate berries, seasoning their meat with them, drinking strawberry soup or a tea made from the leaves,” writer Virginia Scully recounted.
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To learn more about strawberries, see The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, coming in October from Rowman & Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442248861/The-Carrot-Purple-and-Other-Curious-Stories-of-the-Food-We-Eat.
