The Strawberry Connection: Strawberry Cookery with Flavour, Fact and Folklore, from Memories, Libraries and Kitchens of Old and New Friends - and Strangers

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

“Only connect.” Beatrice Ross Buszek has taken E.M. Forster’s famous injunction to heart. Author of The Cranberry Connection, The Blueberry Connection, and The Sugar Bush Connection, she now turns to that most beloved and sweetest of treats, the strawberry.

A fascinating introduction reveals the lack of understanding that prevented successful cultivation until fate took a hand. No one realized that there are male, female, and hermaphrodite forms of the strawberry until exotic Chilean strawberry plants (all of them female, as it later appeared) proved barren once imported to France. Then they were bedded near Virginian strawberry plants for decorative effect. The rest is culinary history. Soon new and delicious strawberries appeared, and a whole new range of possibilities for the cross-fertilization of plants was open to investigation and experiment.

We can all be grateful for the results, which provide us with delicacies by the score: pies, desserts, muffins, toppings, jams and jellies, cakes and cookies, and a potpourri of oddments, as well as soups, drinks, puddings, and salads. The text, on creamy paper picked out with red decorations, is enlivened by period illustrations and a plethora of strawberry anecdotes. A very attractive cookbook-cum-browser, ringbound, with bibliography.