Nothing says summer like a strawberry tart though had it not been for the screw up of an 18th century French spy we might not have the big beautiful strawberry that we know and love today, and I'll tell you that story as I make this tart of strawberries from the reign of King Henry VIII. So thank you to Babbel for sponsoring this video as we examine the accidental history of the strawberry this time on Tasting History. King Henry VIII loved strawberries, in fact he even used strawberry juice to treat an open ulcer on his leg, gross. Luckily for me this is not Medical History, it's Tasting History so I don't have to treat my ulcer, I don't have one. Instead I get to make a recipe, it's from 1545 during the reign of Henry VIII from 'A Proper New Book of Cookery'. For "To make a Tart of Strawberries. Take and strain them with the yolks of four eggs, and a little white bread grated, then season it up with sugar and sweet butter and so bake it." A fairly simple recipe but rather different than a modern strawberry pie which usually has big chunks of strawberries. This is going to be more like a strawberry custard
and part of the reason is that in 16th century Europe they didn't have big strawberries like we have today. At the time all the strawberries in Europe were much smaller about the size of a blackberry, and while they had a similar flavor as the modern strawberry they were typically much sweeter. This is partly because they grew wild and wild fruits just tend to be smaller than the cultivated variety. So every June people would go out picking strawberries where "It groweth in the woods and greens, and shadowy places." And they could usually just be picked up off the ground because that's how they grew kind of strewn about the ground, and that's actually where they likely get their name strawberry because the Old English word for them was 'streawberige'. Even more literal is the German word for strawberry which is 'erdbeere' or earth berry, a word I learned with a little help from today's sponsor Babbel. Babbel is one of the top language learning apps in the world and with their short 10-minute lessons you can get started speaking a new language in as little as 3 week. I also love that they have little games to keep things interesting and podcasts. They're in the language that you're trying to learn so it just gets the language in your ear and really really helps with pronunciation. That's especially important when you are getting ready to travel, like when I went to Austria last year. Well, nobody thought that I was a native speaker or anything, I did get a lot of compliments on my German pronunciation. And the lessons prepare you for real world experiences and
interactions so they're really perfect for if you are getting ready to travel. So when you go into a cafe in Vienna and you have a hankering for a strawberry tart you can say Entschuldigung, wie viel kostet die Erdbeertorte? So whether you're planning on doing some traveling this summer or just want to learn a new language as part of some self-improvement which is always a good thing then click my link in the description or scan this QR code up here to get 60% off of your Babbel subscription. Now while I wanted to use the very, very small wild strawberries that they had back then I was unable to to get any to buy and we tried to grow them but in the words of Cole Porter it's too darn hot so I'm going to be using some modern strawberries. So for this you'll need 1 pound or 450 grams of hulled strawberries, 4 egg yolks a heaping half cup or 90 grams of breadcrumbs, a 1/2 cup or 100 grams of sugar, and 2 tablespoons or 25 grams of butter. So first mash the strawberries into a fine pulp. You can also use a blender for this if you'd like. Then you're going to pass this through a strainer and it's best to use something that isn't too too fine mesh. Press as much through as you can until you have the juice and the fine pulp and then whisk in the egg yolks until smooth and then add the breadcrumbs and whisk until- well, it's not going to get smooth. In fact it's kind of gritty at this point, and I was like well that's weird but I think it's going to work out. Then add the sugar and whisk and finally add the
butter in little pieces and mix. The butter isn't going to completely whisk in but that's okay it'll all melt once we bake it. But the question is what are we going to bake this in because the recipe doesn't actually mention it going into anything but it would have gone into a crust of some sort and there is a recipe in this same 16th century cookbook for "To Make Short Paste for Tart. Take fine flour and a cursy of fair water and a dish of sweet butter and a little saffron, and the
yolks of two eggs and make it thin and tender as ye may." This again is pretty similar to a modern short crust pastry except the addition of saffron, I don't think you'd ever see it in a modern short crust. And it's not there really for the flavor but just to color it. They like to make everything really vibrant so if you want you can add some saffron but you don't actually need to. So you'll need 2 cups or 250 grams of flour, 1 stick or 113 G of butter in small pieces, 2 egg yolks, 1/4 cup or 60 milliliters of cold water and a pinch of optional saffron threads. So first sift the flour into a large bowl then grind the saffron if you're using it and whisk it into the flour. Then add the diced butter and rub it in with your fingertips until it has the texture of fine breadcrumbs. Add the egg yolks and work those in and then a couple tablespoons of the cold water. You may not actually need all of the water you just want to add enough to have the dough come together. Once it starts to come together knead it for just a few seconds, 10 to 15 seconds, so you can bring it together into a ball. And then flatten it into a disc. Then set it in the fridge for about a half an hour if you want. You can actually use it right now, they would have probably just gone ahead and used it, but if you let it sit and rest in a cold place for about 30 minutes it won't shrink as much when you bake it. Once it's rested take it out of the fridge and roll it into a thin circle. I'm the worst at rolling dough it never forms a circle like I want but luckily this is a really forgiving dough so you can actually kind of like patch it together works out just fine. But once it's nice and thin lay it into a tart tin or pie pan and leave it a bit of the crust overhanging. Then we do need to blind bake this or else it's going to have a soggy bottom. So poke some holes in the bottom of the dough then line it with parchment and fill it with baking beans. Then set it in the oven at 425° F, 220° C for 7 minutes then remove it and remove that top crust, make it nice and flat and then return it to the oven for another 5 minutes or so. And then you can take out the baking beans and keep baking it for another 3 to 5 minutes until it's fully cooked. Then you need to let this cool completely before
you add in the filling and then return the tart to the oven at 350° F, 175° C for 30 minutes. Now this recipe comes from the reign of Henry VIII King of England and he did love his strawberries, but he didn't have nothing on the kings of France because they have ties with strawberries going back well
over a thousand years and it's actually because of one of those really strawberry loving kings of France that we now have the big strawberries that you get in the grocery store rather than the teeny strawberries of medieval Europe. Now to figure out how we got to the modern strawberry
we have to look back at the wild strawberry. Tiny wild strawberries have been around for thousands
of years, both in the Americas and across Europe and parts of Asia. Many are sweeter than modern strawberries but many are also sour and then a lot of them are just kind of bland. They've always been eaten eaten as a food but they've also been treated as a medicine just as King Henry VIII used strawberry juice to treat his open ulcer on his leg, the ancient Romans believed that strawberries
could help to cure melancholy and alleviate bad breath. In the Middle Ages in addition to being a delicious summer treat they were also often featured in artwork as symbols of righteousness, or almost conversely as symbols of temptation or lust. There are many varieties in different colors including yellow white and pink but most common was red. These red ones tended to be the sweetest, and were definitely the most beloved strawberries, as Dr. William Butler observed in the 16th century "Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did." Now the only problem with these strawberries is that while they're easily foraged they weren't easily gardened, and that's partly because they take up a lot of space because they grow along the ground they require a lot of space as opposed to something that grows on a bush or on a tree. They also will send out these little runners, some varieties, that will create daughter plants but that's just going
to overtake a garden and then the only thing that you're growing is strawberries. Also they only put out berries once a year in June or at least they did at that time so you're using up a bunch of space and just getting a few strawberries one month out of the year. So the people who usually could grow strawberries were the very wealthy like King Charles V of France who was said to have ordered 1,200 strawberry plants to be planted in his royal gardens. Now that was in the 14th century but like I said the French Kings have ties to strawberries going even further back. The 9th century king of West Francia Charles III, or Charles the Simple, was said to have visited Antwerp where a citizen named Julius de Berry presented him with a platter of ripe woodland strawberries, and the King loved these strawberries so much that he decided to reward the man with a new name, and as if de Berry was not on the nose enough for somebody giving out strawberries he gave the man the new name of 'Fraise' which at the time was the French word for strawberries. The name later became 'Frezier' which you will need to remember for later. Anyway the French kings loved their strawberries, none more so than the Sun King Louis XIV. In sketches of his gardens at Versailles from the late 17th
century it shows four entire plots set aside just for growing strawberries and because just
eating strawberries in June was not good enough for the King he had his gardener Jean-Baptiste de la Quintinie
develop a series of glass houses and windbreaks which would allow them to be harvested starting in March. He loved strawberries so much that eve when his doctor told him that he needed to stop eating them because they made him really gassy he said no and still always ate his favorite dish
of strawberries in wine. Now even though the French had figured out a way to harvest strawberries earlier and both the English and the Dutch had figured out ways to get more strawberries to grow nobody in Europe had seemed to figure out how to make them any bigger but that was about to change thanks to one of King Louis's spies and this is where truth is stranger than fiction because
the spy's name was Amedee Francois Frenzier, that's the name I said you'd need to remember because this man was descended from that original strawberry gifting gentleman 800 years before who had got the name Frezier from from King Charles. I mean it's just crazy. Anyway this spy was going to be sent to the new world to gather intelligence on the Spanish colonies of Chile and Peru, and in 1712 he boarded a merchant vessel so he could pose as a traitor. "...the better to insinuate himself with the Spanish Governors, and to have all opportunities of learning their strength and whatever else he went to be informed of." Well he did his spying and he did it well and he made some really good maps of the area but he seems to have actually maybe been even more interested in something else because in many of his writings from the period he's talking about the culture, the customs, and the food of
the local people who inhabited the area. Two of the groups that he studied were the indigenous
Picunche and Mapuche of Chile who introduced him to a type of strawberry that they had been cultivating for a very long time that was much bigger than the wild strawberries of both Europe and North and South America. "They there plant whole fields with a sort of strawberry rushes, differing from ours... The fruit is generally as big as a walnut, and sometimes as a hen's egg, of a whitish red, and somewhat less delicious of taste than our wood strawberries..." So not as tasty and not as red but you get a lot more strawberry so knowing how much his King loved strawberries he packed up five plants and took them aboard with him, and when he got back to France he gave one of these
plants to the botanist "[Antoine] de Jussieu for the King's Garden, where care will be taken to bring them to bear." They started to plant them and propagate them and before long they had these Chilean strawberry plants growing all over France, the only problem was lots of plants but no strawberries or at least none that looked like the ones he had seen in Chile. They were all small and misshapen something had gone wrong and what that was was that Monsieur Frazier had mistakenly only brought
back female plants. See the plants that he had seen growing these big strawberries were all females, but they were near by male strawberry plants that didn't put out fruit but since he wanted the fruit he just ended up taking the female plants so without any of the male plants they grew for about 50 years and didn't produce any of the big strawberries. Well, not any. There were some places here and there at different times where all of a sudden big strawberries would grow. They realized that they were getting these big strawberries whenever they planted the Chilean strawberry near to another variety of strawberry, usually the European musk strawberry or the Virginia
strawberry from North America. Now both of these strawberries were absolutely tiny. Thomas Jefferson actually grew the Virginia strawberry and in his writings he said that "100 fill half a pint." So they were only about the size of a blueberry but they seemed to get on very well with the Chilean strawberry. Now the person who figured out why this was happening and the person who usually gets credit for discovering this whole thing was a young man, only 17 years old at the time, who was
working at the gardens of Versailles. Antoine Nicolas Duchesne and he was the first to fully understand this male-female plant relationship that was going on. And he was the first to present King Louis XV, who like his predecessor enjoyed a good strawberry, Duchesne presented him a basket full of
these big beautiful strawberries. And over the decades he worked to figure out how to make these big strawberries more red and more flavorful, be a little bit closer to the European wild strawberry, or the Virginia strawberry which were very sweet. The final product was what he termed 'fragaria ananassa', pineapple strawberry because "the perfume of the fruit is closely similar to the pineapple." Today there is a different strawberry often called the pineapple strawberry that is not exactly the same but this original pineapple strawberry is basically the mother of all big strawberries today or at least most of them, the garden strawberry which is what you would get at the
grocery store in most places, and is what I am using in today's tart which should be about ready. So after 30 minutes the filling of the tart should have puffed up nice and you can take it out of the oven and let it cool completely. And then once it's cool you can either serve it as is or you can do your best to decorate the top like a Tudor rose which I tried to do and it kind of worked I think. And here we are a tart of strawberries from Tudor England. So it actually firmed up really nice. I am curious about the texture with those breadcrumbs in there. I'm not going to have a strawberry on top I'm just going to have the actual filling, and gonna have this big bite. Whatever. Y'all, that may be one of the best things I've ever made on the channel or in general. I don't think I've ever had such a wallop of strawberry flavor. It's like concentrated strawberry because we threw out so much of the of the pulp and pith
and whatever. And it is just a strawberry flavor- that is so strawberry-y, it's almost like strawberry candy. That's really good and this is nice and smooth. It's not like custardy smooth but it's very smooth and it's nice and airy as well. That's really, really good. I mean the crust is crumbly, buttery... fine. Like I said you don't taste the saffron you just get a little bit of color from it but I don't think it's necessary. And I think you could use anything the the thing is at this period they often didn't even eat the crust of the tart. They would just eat the filling, and I think that's just great so I don't know if you could just do it without a crust at all like just put it in a dish but probably. This is really, really good. You got to make this! Hm! Now one thing I did find interesting was as I was looking at all these old recipes I kept seeing strawberry come up but very
often it wasn't the fruit of the strawberry, it was the leaves of the strawberry. They would use it the same way that you would any green. They would use the leaves of the strawberry which I thought was was pretty interesting but buying strawberry leaves is even harder than finding wild
strawberries 'cus usually you just get the berry so probably not going to make those unless I
take them from the garden which I guess I could. Anyway, thanks again to Babbel for sponsoring this video again 60% off of your subscription when you click the link in the description, and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
