Sauteed Lettuce Salad: A recipe repeat for our colon-cleansing times

We've run today's recipe before, but now that we have a cyclosporiasis outbreak I think wilted lettuce worth revisiting. After all, the surest way to kill germs is to cook them. Had you even heard of cyclosporiasis before the outbreak? Neither had most people outside of the CDC and the USDA. That's why (until Trump and his handlers took office) we fund government programs to keep these things out of our food. In theory, this means that we the laypeople can live happily unaware of things like "screwworms" and "explosive diarrhea parasites." But nowadays, you're better off assuming your salad is as germy as raw meat and thus getting it into a hot frying pan. 

Wilted lettuce (doesn't "sauteed lettuce" sound better?) and the latest outbreak also remind us that most weird-looking recipes evolved for a reason (with the exception of the mid-century burst of bizarre foods that came out of advertising companies spending more money on in-office alcohol than ad photographers). Now that every salad comes with an elevated risk of a surprise colon cleanse, it's easy to see why people used to cook it.

So, with that said, let's remember that 1) cutting government funds "for efficiency" without seeing what would break leads to nationwide disease, and 2) salad greens can be cooked, even if we're not used to it anymore. 

Anyway, in case it helps in these increasingly horrid times, here (again) is the wilted lettuce! 

~---------~ 

Are your salads getting monotonous? Do you need a "pleasant variation from the day's usual tricks?" Are you concerned about budget cuts to food safety monitoring and therefore want to ensure that any stowaway microbes don't get past your stovetop?

Wilted Lettuce 3 hard cooked eggs, sliced 1 large head lettuce ½ teaspoon salt (or more to suit taste) 1 teaspoon sugar 6 slices bacon, cut into small (half-inch ish) pieces 2 tbsp vinegar Wash the lettuce thoroughly, drain it, and chop it into pieces slightly larger than bite size. In a very large frying pan, cook the bacon until it is crisp and the drippings have come out of it. Reduce heat to medium-low. Add the vinegar, then add the lettuce and eggs. Cook until the lettuce is tender but still bright green.  Serve at once. The leftovers aren't as good as when it's fresh, so make only as much as everyone will eat the first time. We recommend serving with a crusty bread to soak up the juices. Source: Chicago Tribune; April 17, 1936

Today, we are opening my great-grandmother's recipe binder and trying one of her newspaper clippings. I ran into problems at the first line of the ingredient list. An unfortunately-placed ink smudge made it impossible to read the amount of boiled eggs. I couldn't tell if it called for six or eight.

I emailed the Chicago Public Library, asking if they could track this recipe down and find a more legible copy. A reply arrived within a few hours: "Today is your lucky day, this recipe happened to be in the Chicago Tribune, whose database we can pretty easily search. The recipe is attached. It looks like 3 is the number of eggs."

Join or donate to your local Friends of the Public Library, everybody!

 

At first I wondered what kind of lettuce I should put in this. Today, we mostly default to iceberg, but how common was it in 1936? Before I let myself get caught up in period-correct salad greens, I checked the prices. Iceberg lettuce suddenly seemed perfect.

Back at the house, the lettuce had to wait until I had boiled the eggs. Since I never remember how to do that, I have to look up Delia Smith's guide every single time. I didn't think to look if she has a guide for neatly slicing them elsewhere on her site. But if you look past my inept knifework, you can see that these came out of the pot at the perfect time. Unfortunately, they also stank up the kitchen.

I have previously mentioned my theory that the weirder and wackier flavors of yesteryear made more sense when everyone smoked, whether they lit their own or inhaled a pack a week secondhand. In a similar vein, I would like to speculate that people didn't mind adding boiled eggs to everything because you couldn't smell them over the omnipresent stale smoke. Price of eggs notwithstanding, it seems like people these days don't "volumize" casseroles with chopped boiled eggs as often as we did when every sofa had an ashtray balanced on the armrest.

After getting the eggs ready, our recipe conveniently has us cover the faintly sulfurous smell with bacon. This is one of those recipes where cheap bacon (the kind that's mostly fat) might actually be the better choice. I don't think the recipe necessarily wanted to add bacon meat much as harvest the drippings for lettuce-wilting.

This salad can torture everyone in the next room of the house. First, they get the tantalizing scent of sizzling bacon. Then, all at once, they get the bitter smell of hot lettuce. I wonder if the people in a certain Chicago apartment were leery whenever they smelled bacon coming from my great-grandmother's stove. Sometimes you get bacon and waffles, other times you get wilted lettuce.

Speaking of title ingredients, we were ready to wilt our lettuce! We are told to "wash lettuce, drain, and chop." It is surprisingly hard to get all the water out of lettuce after you've washed it. I didn't want to go out and buy a salad spinner, but I definitely wanted to borrow one.

I cut the recipe to one-third, and the biggest skillet was barely up to it. Did everyone in Chicago have paella pans?

Just like fresh spinach, the lettuce shrank a lot. This may be why people don't cook lettuce very often. But on the other hand, it's a lot easier to eat your daily quota of greens when you can compress them into a small bowl.

 

Things were going ever-so-well until I added the egg after the lettuce was done. While I was stirring everything long enough to warm up the egg, the lettuce lost its bright green color and took on that dull gray look that says "You're not leaving this table until you finish your vegetables."

That bowl contains a third of a head of lettuce. That's, like, two or three wedge salads. Lettuce shrinks a lot on the stove.

Did you know iceberg lettuce has a flavor? Well, after shrinking it down to a seventh of its original size, its flavor is concentrated. The bitter lettuce (not overcooked, just its actual taste), salty bacon, vinegar, and boiled eggs went together better than I thought. But you have to be in the mood for pungency before you think this is "a pleasant variation from the day's usual tricks." As I said earlier, I can't help wondering if the flavor of this made more sense when life had a background of cigarettes and higher liquor sales.

Purely for the heck of it, I sent a picture of this to Marcus, our longtime friend who definitely isn't traumatized from trying various recipes on the blog. He did not seem to regret being too far away to drop by.

 

Because I still had two-thirds of a lettuce and another boiled egg in the refrigerator. I soon made a second wilted salad. This time, I cut up the bacon before cooking it instead of after. As we learned from the cream onion pie, the bacon gets crispier and the fat renders off better. I also didn't have to pause mid-recipe for a chopping break. (As a food safety note, chop your lettuce and get it off the cutting board BEFORE cutting up the bacon. That way, you don't get raw-meat germs in the greens.)

Instead of waiting til the end, I added the boiled eggs just as everything was heating up. The lettuce stayed green, but I don't think it made a dramatic visual difference. There's really no way to make iceberg lettuce look pretty after you've cooked it.

This recipe is not disgusting, but it's also not a classic waiting for rediscovery. You have to be in the mood for some well-placed bitter flavors before you can like it. But if you're like me and always keep a jar of sauerkraut on hand, you might not be disappointed. Some of my friends suggested I try this with kale instead of lettuce, so I'm going to keep an eye on the clearance produce. 

Despite the lack of salad ecstasy, I'm not going to cross out the wilted lettuce in my reprinted copy of the book. This recipe may have regained a place in our kitchens thanks to CDC budget cuts. It might be wise to start cooking all our vegetables again-- or at least briefly heating them to get rid of any microscopic stowaways. And of course, this salad is a good way to salvage any salad greens that aren't quite as fresh as they were when you bought them.

Cheese and Ham Pie: or, Carbohydrate bliss interspersed with meat

Today, we are continuing our Australian salute to cheese!

Cheese and Ham Pie 4 oz ham, cut into into bite-size pieces 6 oz egg noodles, cooked in salted water 4 oz (1 cup) grated cheese 1 oz (2 tbsp) butter, cut into small pieces 1 cup milk 1 egg Pastry for one crust Salt and pepper to taste Heat oven to 350° (gas mark 4, 180°C). Coat a pie pan with cooking spray. Sprinkle the ham in the pan. Place the noodles on top. Then sprinkle the cheese over the noodles. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Then dot with the butter. Whisk together the egg and the milk, then pour over all. Cover with a top crust and cut holes to vent. Bake about 30 minutes or until golden. Note: If you're buying ready-made pastry instead of doing it yourself, puff-paste would be really good on top of this. "In the Kitchen," The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; July 8, 1935; page 3

"In the Kitchen," The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; July 8, 1935

This is the season for leftover ham. I deliberately took home a lot of leftover ham from Easter and froze it until the time felt right, which I decided is now. 

As it turned out,  ham is the first word in the recipe title but we don't use much of it. This is what happens to cooking when the Depression was on.

Not pictured: 1 ounce butter.

What the recipe lacks in ham, it makes up with carbs and cheese. Six ounces of macaroni is a lot more than you may think. After mounding the cheese on top, our pie overtopped the pan.

Lastly, we laid on the pie crust. I folded the extra dough back over the pie-- partially to make a should-have-been cute border but mostly because I was too lazy to trim it.

This pie is what leftovers should be: smothered in carbs and buried in cheese. I probably could have baked it a little longer, but I didn't. It was plain, simple, and just what I hoped for.

In full disclosure, some free-swimming liquid did seep into the freshly-vacated parts of the pie pan when we served it. But although weepimg pies usually bother me, this is one of those recipes where I don't think there's any point in caring about drips. Of course, you can serve this with more bread to soak them up. After all, carbs go great with carbs.

Raspberry Puffs: Serve as breakfast or dessert

Today, we are making muffins out of iffy fruit!

Raspberry Puffs 1 tsp salt 2 cups flour 2 tsp baking powder ¼ cup shortening or butter 1 egg ½ cup sugar ¾ cup milk 1½ cups raspberries, fresh or frozen* Heat oven to 375°. Grease a 12-cup muffin pan, or line it with paper cups. (These fall out of the pan pretty easily without the paper liners, so you don't need to go out and buy them if you don't have any.) Sift together the salt, flour, and baking powder. Or combine them in a small bowl and stir with a whisk or a fork to fluff them up and break up any flour lumps. Cream together the sugar and shortening. Beat in the egg. Add milk alternately with the dry ingredients. You want to try to keep the batter at more or less the same consistency the whole time. Fold in the berries. If using frozen raspberries, try to mix them in quickly-- before they have a chance to thaw and break apart. Fill the muffin cups about half to two-thirds full. Bake until the tops are slightly golden, about 15 minutes. These are good served warm with butter, raspberry jelly, or with the following sauce:       Raspberry Sauce 1½ cups raspberry juice† ½ cup water ½ cup sugar 2 tablespoons cornstarch 1 tablespoon butter Thoroughly mix the cornstarch and sugar in a saucepan, eliminating all lumps. Add juice and water. Cook over medium heat (or high heat if you're really careful to scrape the bottom of the pot) until it boils and thickens. Remove from heat and add butter, stirring until melted. Serve hot on the Raspberry Puffs. *The original recipe uses canned whole raspberries. You might find them at a farmer's market (or if you do your own canning and made a batch). †If you use the above-mentioned preserved raspberries, you can use the juice you drained off for the sauce. Or you might buy raspberry syrup (like the flavored syrups they have in coffee shops). If you buy raspberry syrup, mix it with the water in the recipe and then thoroughly dissolve the cornstarch before turning on the heat. Taste the sauce before adding any additional sugar. A Book of Selected Recipes: The Ashland Times-Gazette Cookbook, Mrs. George O. Thurn, 1934

I've been dog-sitting for my parents these past few days, and found a small tub of raspberries starting to expire in the fridge. (I think we all know that raspberries last about thirty seconds before growing fur.) I didn't know what to do with a nearly-full box of raspberries, but our old friend Mrs. George Thurn did!

A Book of Selected Recipes: the Ashland Times-Gazette Cookbook, Mrs. George O. Thurn, 1934

Even though I wouldn't eat raw berries if I had to pick off the fuzzy bits first, I figured that any latent spores would get baked away. But before we get to wholesome fruit, the recipe starts with a quarter cup of shortening. It always feels weird to open a completely new can of scientifically white fat and gaze upon it as it waits to transform ordinary cooking into an unnatural act.

As often happens with scientifically modern recipes, our mixing bowl started with a complete absence of color.

Every time I come back here and do a bit of cooking, I am surprised my mom's mixer hasn't finished falling apart. The motor came half-unmoored inside the housing who-knows-how-many years ago, and now the whole thing shakes and rattles your hand. But apparently this mixer is like my first car: no matter how much it falls apart, it simply won't give up. (The car was deemed unfit for public roads by the end of its time, but damnit it drove itself onto the reaper truck.)

Moving down the recipe, we are supposed to sift our flour with a few other ingredients. Instead, I put them in the really big measuring cup and whisked them until all the lumps in the flour had loosened up. I'll have to keep an eye out for a quart-sized measuring cup. (That's one liter-ish for our metric friends.) It makes an unexpectedly convenient mixing bowl for small batches.

Our puff batter turned out a lot thicker than I thought it would. As a recipe note, there was no dairy milk in the house-- only powdered or almond. I went with the latter because I figured it would be like adding lots of almond extract. You couldn't taste any difference, but it would have been nice.

And now, we finally arrived at the fruit! Mrs. Thurn calls for canned raspberries, which I have never seen. Did factories used to can raspberries the same way they do peaches? Or did Mrs. Thurn think we either canned our own fruit or got some from a neighbor or at a farmer's market? Regardless of how your fruit arrives, this recipe uses a decent-sized cereal bowl of it. I added a handful of blueberries because we didn't quite have enough raspberries for the recipe. No one likes fruit parsimony.

They only look this good because I picked off a lot of fuzzy bits.

The raspberries broke apart into lots of little pieces as I stirred them in, regardless of how gentle I was. At first I was disappointed, but then I realized this means there will be lots of berry thoughout each muffin. If you want your raspberries to stay intact, you might buy them frozen and mix them in very fast before they have a chance to thaw.

I baked these for fifteen minutes as directed. They sprang back when gently pressed, but looked pale. I thought that perhaps this recipe just doesn't brown very much. Some things stay pale no matter how long you bake them-- like Mrs. Wilson's one-egg cake or the pepperless pepper cake.

 

When I took one out of the pan, it was cooked but still felt very doughy. You'll know what I mean if you've ever eaten brown-and-serve rolls without browning them. So, I put the muffins back in the oven until they got a little golden on top. I thought this might harden and dry them out, but they were still wonderfully soft.

Without the attached sauce recipe (which I didn't make because I don't have any raspberry juice), these are right in the middle ground between savory and sweet. They're not quite a dessert (or at least, not by American standards), but they're also not something you'd serve next to a pot roast. The muffin batter was itself mildly flavorless, which would have been a problem in other recipes but today meant that it really let the raspberries' flavor pop.

Actually, given how these are fully baked before getting nice and browned, these might make good brown-and-serve breakfast muffins. You could bake them when you have the time and then pop them in the freezer (or just leave them out if you'll be serving them the next day). Then you would only need to stagger into the kitchen and put them in the oven before you start the tea.

Summer Spaghetti: or, Good tomatoes never need help

We meant to go to the hardware store and ended up at a roadside produce tent.

Summer Spaghetti 2 pounds very ripe tomatoes 1 small sweet onion, finely chopped 1 clove garlic, minced or pressed 2 tablespoons finely minced fresh parsley ½ teaspoon basil ¼ cup olive oil Red wine vinegar* Salt and pepper to taste 8 oz shell pasta Freshly grated Parmesan to taste Peel and dice the tomatoes.† Add the onions, garlic, parsley, basil and olive oil to the tomatoes. Season to taste with vinegar, salt, and pepper. Set aside. Cook and drain the spaghetti. Toss the hot spaghetti with the tomato mixture. Serve immediately tossed with cheese. The tomato mixture may be prepared ahead and refrigerated. Bring it back to room temperature before mixing with the hot spaghetti (you can just microwave it for a short time). This is also good served cold, especially with fresh lime juice squeezed over it. *The original recipe uses tarragon wine vinegar, but that seems hard to find these days. † Peeling tomatoes is not as irksome as you may think. If you cut a slit in them, then dip them in boiling water for 30-60 seconds, then put them in cold water, you can pull the peel off with your fingers. Here's a video showing how to do it. The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

After several years of nothing but supermarket vegetables, it was amazing to find peaches that smelled like peaches. The scent of the cantaloupes actually hit us as soon as we walked in the tent and told us how good they were. For once, we actually ate all of the produce instead of letting it slowly rot in the fridge with our other good intentions.

Getting to today's recipe, we got some really big tomatoes. Like, usually you can't get tomatoes like this unless your neighbor has a tomato patch in her spare time. They looked ordinary sitting by themselves, so here's one with my typewriter for scale.

These were good enough to just slice onto a plate, but we got a lot of tomatoes. So I decided to make something called "Summer Spaghetti."

The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

I've been eyeing this recipe for a long time, but I could tell that it absolutely depends on good ingredients. And for some reason, the farmer's markets around here all close close bizarrely early in the morning. Even if I end up trudging in the hottest part of the miserable afternoon, I refuse to set an alarm clock to buy vegetables.

The recipe calls for peeled and diced tomatoes. I had horrible visions of squishing the tomatoes into a sad mess while hacking at them with a paring knife, which nearly made me give up before I had put the spaghetti in the pot. Then I figured that if anyone could make peeling tomatoes easier, Delia Smith could. Sure enough, she has a video about peeling tomatoes that requires no knife skills. She says that if you put them in boiling water for a minute or so, "you'll find the skins will slip off really easily." It sounded too good to be true, but it worked! Doing our tomatoes the Delia way was as easy as picking the peel off of a cooked potato with your fingers. I've said this many times, but Delia Smith never fails to come to your aid.

In full disclosure, chopping the tomatoes was a slithery, messy process-- even with a freshly sharpened knife. I don't think there is an easy way around that without some very specific factory machinery. Also, that runoff so delicious that I tipped the cutting board into a teacup.

Aside from waiting for our pasta to boil, this was surprisingly fast to put together. This is all the chopping you have to do for this recipe. If you're half-decent with a knife, you can probably do it while the spaghetti's cooking.

I should have put the tomatoes in a bigger bowl to make room for everything else. But doesn't it look gorgeous anyway?

I should note that our tomatoes got soupy within a few seconds of stirring everything together. This must be why we're told to serve immediately.

I had prepared the full amount of tomatoes since the recipe says we can do that ahead if desired, but only cooked half the pasta. I think this accidentally improved our summer spaghetti. This is the recipe if you make it as written. Don't you think it needs more tomato?

But if you should double the tomatoes (or halve the pasta without halving the tomatoes), you get this. Doesn't it look better?

Note that we splurged on actual Parmesan instead of canned powder.

I don't understand why the recipe writer tried to stretch the summer produce with extra pasta. Farmer's market vegetables don't tend to have a shelf life, and there's no point in parsimony with short-lived ingredients.

This is one of those recipes that reminds you that vegetables can be so damn good. Obviously, if you use the produce from the supermarket, this would be as thrilling as one of those droopy broccoli trays in an office breakroom. But in the summertime when the really good tomatoes appear at farmer's markets, you owe it to yourself.

Sour Cream Cookies: I wouldn't bother if I were you

After so many successes, Mrs. Mary Martensen has let me down.

Sour Cream Cookies ¼ cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 eggs, beaten ½ tsp lemon juice 1 cup sour cream ½ tsp baking soda 3½ cups flour 1 tsp baking powder Heat oven to 400°. Have greased or parchment-lined baking sheets ready. Cream the butter, then thoroughly beat in the sugar. Mix in the eggs, lemon juice, and sour cream. Sift in the remaining dry ingredients. Roll one-fourth inch thick, sprinkle with sugar, and bake ten minutes. Makes sixty cookies. Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

I always keep sour cream on hand because it's nice in so many things, and my current container was getting close to expiring. And while one can throw out things that are at the end of their prime, aren't cookies better?

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

Mrs. Mary Martensen tells us to add the sugar and a couple of other things to the bowl all at once, but I could already tell that would end badly. After all, our small allotment of butter was still clinging to the sides of the bowl in hard clumps. So I instead beat in the sugar until the two were thoroughly mixed before introducing the remaining ingredients.

Ahhhh, clump free!

We are directed to add "eggs, well beaten." I decided that the eggs would be plenty well-beaten after I was done mixing them in.

And so, it was time to add in the sour cream. Bearing in mind the New England raisin drops, I also added some vanilla-- and also some salt because I think they had unsalted butter in 1933.

After mixing in the flour, I began to doubt Mrs. Mary Martensen. (She had already disappointed us with the cabbage au gratin. At the time I charitably decided that no one's perfect.) No one could take a rolling pin to this sticky mess and make it a quarter-inch thick. 

I thought that maybe like Maxine Menster's cookies, you're supposed to refrigerate the dough first. Perhaps an experienced cook would have known that just from reading the recipe and mentally adding up all the ingredients in their head. 

But because I am not that good, I had already preheated the oven and refused to waste the electricity. So I forgot about doing things properly and thoroughly coated the mass of dough in flour to keep it from sticking. After that, I didn't need a rolling pin. I only had to pat it out with my fingers.

I was surprised at how nice and neat these cookies looked. My success felt like cheating fate.

I feared that these would melt into dough puddles, but instead they became adorable little poufs.

I tasted these and was immediately glad I halved the recipe. They're... not good. They have a perfect texture, but they taste like nothing. They're not merely bland. They taste empty. There is no absence of subtle flavor. Instead, there is no flavor. They weren't even sweet- the sugar somehow dissipated along with everything else. The dough had been promising, all the life in the cookies got cooked out.

I guess it's nice that I cleaned out the fridge and avoided the temptation of excessive calories. Really, this recipe confounds me. The texture is perfect, but they're so depressing. These cookies are what Maxine Menster's are glad they ain't.

Strawberry Whip: or, Spring is turning into summer

We overestimated how much we wanted strawberries.

Strawberry Whip 2 tbsp gelatin, or 1 (¼-oz) envelope 1 tbsp water About 8 oz fresh strawberries A little lemon juice, if desired 1 tsp vanilla Red food coloring, if desired 1 cup cream ½ cup sugar Mix the gelatin and water in a small microwave-safe bowl. Set aside to soak about 5 minutes. Puree the strawberries, then pour through a strainer to remove the seeds and stringy bits. Microwave the gelatin until melted and watery, about 5 seconds or so. Add the gelatin, lemon juice, and vanilla to the strawberries. If desired, add a few drops of red food coloring. Whip the cream and sugar in a large bowl. Then fold in the strawberries. Transfer to the container of your choice, and place in the coldest part of your refrigerator. Chill and serve. Adapted from a handwritten manuscript, 1930s-1940s Notebook of Hannah Dannehy O'Neil

Strawberries have been astonishingly cheap these past few weeks. I don't know if it's a bizarre confluence of economic coincidences, if we live near a lot of strawberry farms and didn't know it, or if it's some combination of the two. Furthermore, the berries are actually in season (ish), so they taste like strawberries instead of like nothing. We got one small box last week, and they were so good that we bought a lot of them the next time we went grocery shopping. They soon started to get pruny and squishy, and I didn't want to lose them.

I could have suspended the berries in red Jello. As many have noted before me, gelatin is surprisingly good at extending the lifespan of fresh produce. But today, I wanted to adopt my great-grandmother's apricot whip. Instead of stewing apricots, we're blenderizing strawberries.

After a good pulverization, I ran the strawberries through a sieve. This was the only tedious(ish) part of this whole recipe, but would you want all these seeds and stringy bits in your pink fluff?

As soon as I realized I was making "pink fluff," I had horrible visions of the ballistic-grade pink pie we made a while ago. 

And also, pink fluff is one of the more infamous midcentury desserts. It's almost a symbol of the insipid "cooking" that involved creatively dumping three cans into one bowl. But then I figured this is literally strawberries and cream (with some gelatin to keep it from deflating, of course).

Speaking of strawberries, I decided they needed a bit of artificial assistance to look their best after getting blenderized. Fruit is rarely fruit-colored enough.

This reminds me a lot of the cream of strawberry pie we made a while ago. Both of them are basically strawberries and whipped cream. And both of them looked so pretty at this stage.

This recipe was agreeably fast since we didn't have to wait on a pot of simmering dried fruit. Only ten minutes after sprinkling the gelatin over the water, we were ready to, as the recipe says, "Chill and serve." And then, of course, we discovered that the bowl-scrapings were delicious.

 

This wasn't as magical as I fantasized it would be, but it was still very good indeed. It did get a bit bland in the refrigerator, though- which surprised me. I know strawberry is perhaps the most inoffensive of artificial flavors, but the actual fruits tend to actually have a taste. So while this isn't necesessarily the best way to appreciate fresh strawberries, it's pretty good if they've slipped just a bit past it.