Strawberry Pie time!

      If you go to your basement and pull out the March 1964 issue of Better Homes and Gardens, you'll find the recipe for "Strawberry Pie."  

     You will also look around and realize that you have a problem, known as "Plyushkin's Disorder," characterized by "persistent difficulty in parting with possessions and engaging in excessive acquisition of items that are not needed or for which no space is available."  You need to a) get help, b) get rid of your stacks of Better Homes and Gardens, National Geographics and Popular Mechanics, and c) SAVE THAT RECIPE!

     There are strawberries, and then there are strawberries.  Our present-day strawberries are based on combinations of four native species found in North and South America, Europe and Asia.  Reference to strawberries are even found in Roman sources.  The United states produces a third of the world's crop, and California grows 90% of that.  

     However... strawberries grown remotely and then transported from such places must stand up to that travel and arrive in your grocery store in something resembling an edible state.  Although breeding has improved these remotely grown berries markedly, the local ones are still the way to go.  Agricultural scientists are madly working on the problem, trying to toughen up the really good ones.

     Unfortunately, this effort is complicated by the fact that domesticated strawberries have eight sets of chromosomes.  You, lowly human, only have two sets of chromosomes.  Bow to the strawberry!

     Locally grown strawberries in our region of North Carolina are picked that morning and are on the stands along the roads by 10:00 AM, 

     They are then found in Paula's kitchen by about 10:07 AM.  And at least a third of them are devoured by around lunch time, but hey, strawberry High Season only comes once a year.

     Do you still have that recipe?  Paula's sainted mother clipped it in April of 1964, and it has been guarded closely ever since.  It consists of a flaky pie crust and a creamy custard filling, topped with halved berries in a strawberry glaze.  

     There were many reasons why I married Paula, but there are even more why that marriage should continue, and this strawberry pie is one of them.  When we were in Peru, it caused grown men to literally bow at her feet.

     There is a long-standing tradition in the family that if a dessert is particularly good, one may lick one's plate.  This happened spontaneously when Paula's strawberry pie was introduced in that country.

    Note that the Peruvian location is corroborated by the presence of the Inca Kola bottle on the table.  The serendipitous fusion of cuisines only heightened the gustatory experience.  

     Now that it's just two of us, and age + metabolism = trouble, Paula will sometimes do the "miniature" version.

     It's existence after the picture was taken could only have been measured in femtoseconds.

     Paula has passed the recipe to her offspring, and it has spread to Central Asia, Coastal Carolina, and the Pacific Northwest, and now to the next generations.

     It's always sad when the last strawberry stand packs up for the year.  I guess it's back to cleaning the magazine stacks out of the basement and....  Hey!  That's cool!  I'd forgotten I still had these!

       No way I can throw THOSE out!

Dave, Paula and Alfred E. Neuman