Strawberries, Raspberries, and Blackberries.
Never wash strawberries or raspberries that are intended to be eaten as fresh fruit. If they are so gritty as to require this process, keep them off the table. You will certainly ruin the flavor beyond repair if you wash them, and as certainly induce instant fermentation and endanger the coats of the eaters’ stomachs, if, after profaning the exquisite delicacy of the fruit to this extent, you complete the evil work by covering them with sugar, and leaving them to leak their lives sourly away for one or two hours.
Put them on the table in glass dishes, piling them high and lightly, send around powdered sugar with them and cream, that the guests may help themselves. It is not economical perhaps, but it is a healthful and pleasant style of serving them—I had almost said the only decent one.
“But I don’t know who picked them!” cries Mrs. Fussy.
No, my dear madam! nor do you know who makes the baker’s bread, or confectioner’s cakes, creams, jellies, salads, etc. Nor, for that matter, how the flour is manufactured out of which you conjure your dainty biscuit and pies. I was so foolish as to go into a flour-mill once, and having seen a burly negro, naked to the waist, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, stand in a bank of “fine family flour,” a foot deep in the lowest part, on a July day, shovelling it into barrels for the market, I rushed into the outer air a sicker and a wiser woman.
I know God made strawberries. “Doubtless,” says Bishop Butler, “He could have made a better berry, but He never did!” The picker’s light touch cannot mar flavor or beauty, nor, were her fingers filthy as a chimney-sweep’s, could the delicate fruit suffer from them as from your barbarous baptism. You would like to know who picked them. I should inquire instead, “Who washed them, and in what?” I recollect seeing a housekeeper, who was afflicted with your inquiring turn of mind, wash strawberries in a wash-hand basin!