Strawberries with Brown Sugar and Sour Cream
In Santa Barbara strawberries are available year round, but there is a first flush of them coming out of winter where they seem to taste so much sweeter. They seem more fragrant, and they’re bursting with flavor. Perhaps it’s from the warmer temperatures that our senses are awakened.
This simple recipe comes from childhood, specifically from the community cookbook made by the parents from the Starr King Parent-Child Workshop. It’s adapted from Christiane Gudnasun’s recipe, whose mother, Kay, as editor helped handwrite and hand-type the entire cookbook. Called The Melting Pot, it was published exactly fifty years ago in the spring of 1976. Thank you for the inspiration, Christiane and Kay. We’ve been eating this for half a century now. What was once her favorite became ours. And what turned out to be a popular recipe elsewhere
started out in a Santa Barbara co-operative cookbook that felt small and special at the time, and still is in this household.
Growing up, my family had a little garden patch by my father’s orchid shadehouse. We had weekly chores for weeding the garden and harvesting the produce. Here, we drank from the hoses and ran barefoot through the yard. We ate strawberries straight from the patch as well, but those that made it back to the house were prepared in an effort to make us feral children appear civilized for a brief moment. Guests were caught off-guard that the ingredients, so common, fused into an exquisite bite that was greater than the sum of its parts.
This is for the freshest, most fragrant sweet strawberries from the farmers market or your own yard. Ideally warmed by the sun. Bring together small bowls, plates and spoons that evoke the most joy. Serve this alongside a cup of tea. This recipe is for sharing, but should you have only a single strawberry, that one exquisite bite is all you need.
Strawberries with Brown Sugar and Sour Cream
Ingredients
- 1 pint strawberries, room temperature
- ¼ cup sour cream
- 1 tablespoon light brown sugar, more as needed
Instructions
- Rinse the strawberries and dry lightly with a paper towel.
- Set the sour cream and brown sugar in separate pretty bowls on the table.
- To serve, spoon a dollop of sour cream onto a plate and a teaspoon of brown sugar onto the same plate.
- Using your fingers, dip each strawberry first into the sour cream, then press it lightly into the brown sugar, as little or as much as you like. Take a bite, as big or as small as you like. The number of times you dip into the sugar seems to be inversely related to your age.
