Did you know about Strawberries and Cream

Every year about 27,000 kg of strawberries are eaten during the Wimbledon Tennis Championships, together with 7,000 litres of cream. The popularity of serving strawberries with cream is possibly as old as the event itself. So here are a few facts about Strawberries and their origins.

• There are 600 strawberry varieties found today which stem from five or six original wild species.
• Strawberries are a variety of the rose family called Fragaria.
• The ends of the plant stems swell up and redden after the flowers have been pollinated. The actual fruit is the tiny seed embedded in the fleshy strawberry, technically making a strawberry not a berry.
• The word strawberry comes from the Old English streowberie or streawbelige. This is probably a combination of the words strewed & berry. Strewed means scattered or spread across. Straw could have referred to the straw that was used to keep the strawberries dry in storage.
• Legend has it that Cardinal Wolsey was the first person to serve strawberries and cream together, at his palace Hampton Court.
• Cardinal Woolsey would have used English wild strawberries which are small and grow on the edges of woods. These wild strawberries are thought to have been a delicacy as far back as Roman times.
• In the 16th Century song The Old Wives Tale  the line “Strawberties swimming in the cream”, tells us that this was a popular dish in the times of Shakespeare.
• Developing the perfect strawberry has been a mission for horticulturalists all over the world for hundreds of years. The modern strawberry has its basis in an experiment which crossed the flavorful but small woodland strawberry from Virginia with the much larger and hardier white strawberry discovered in Chile. Michael Keens displayed this new variant to the Horticultural Society in 1826 in England and this is the origin of the Strawberry as we know it today
• In the UK strawberries are in season between May and September.