In the days before power-hitting and the Williams sisters, when John McEnroe was a player, not a commentator, the last week of Wimbledon was usually accompanied by grumbling at the outrageous cost of the strawberries and cream. Times change. Now we are an affluent nation, happy to pay £3 for a slice of Starbucks cake, and the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club's strawberries seem really quite reasonable. For £1.85, you get a punnet of strawberries containing a minimum of ten fruit, with cream generously thrown in at no extra cost.
Looked at objectively, however, this is still rather pricey. And strawberries that have been wilting against the reflective heat of Jennifer Capriati's suntan are not likely to be at their freshest. If you want bargain strawberries, as fresh as they come, you must indulge in a different summer sport, and pick your own. That said, picking your own is one of those activities most apt to bring out the disappointments of a British summer. At its best, strawberry-picking is pure pleasure. There are few sights more charming than that of a summer orchard, and no smell more heady than that of strawberry plants. Nestling among the delicate white flowers, like patterns on a teaset, are scarlet, lipstick-red berries. Usually, the fruit costs no more than £1 for a huge punnet, five times the size and ten times the goodness of those at Wimbledon.
The trouble is, you usually think of picking your own only on sunny weekends. But, unfortunately, this is just when everyone else thinks of doing it, too. So there you are, in a sweltering field, surrounded by rows of other sweating, crouching human beings, who arrived half an hour earlier than you and have taken all the good berries already. As the sun beats down, you adorn your pathetically empty punnet with a heap of yellowy, underripe berries. The only ripe ones left are half-eaten vestiges, crushed underfoot and rotting slightly. When at last you do find a really red strawberry, you get so overexcited that you eat it at once.
This is a classic problem of collective action. Individuals have to decide individually the best thing to do in a given situation - on a sunny day, go strawberry-picking. They all come up with the same decision. But because they are all doing it at once, it is no longer the best thing to do - all the nice strawberries have gone before you get there. Therefore, picking strawberries on sunny days is no longer the rational thing to do and everyone gets cross.
Some say that the answer - to straw-berries, if not politics - is to go in the rain. Friends recently came back from a rainy visit to the Chivers strawberry fields with ten bulging punnets of luscious fruit. But - speaking from a position of sour straw-berries - they must have got very wet, and there's a limit to the number of straw-berries you can use. (These friends recommend blending them, straight from frozen, into a fruit smoothie.)
Anyway, there is no disaster in underripe strawberries. Instead of eating them fresh, with cream, you can make a pie. I recently wrote in this column that there wasn't much point in cooking strawberries. That was before I tasted Simon Hopkinson's hot strawberry pie. Even when made with underripe fruit, it has all the fragrance of summer, with added comfort. He says it's what his mother used to make for him when he returned home from boarding school. For the original recipe, consult Gammon & Spinach (recently reissued by Pan, £6.99). I changed it a bit. The Hopkinson version is twice as big and made in a cake tin, but I didn't have enough strawberries for that. And I added sugar to the pastry because I like sweet pastry for fruit pies, though many would disagree.
For the pastry, lightly rub together (by hand or food processor) 125g chilled diced butter, 250g self-raising flour and a pinch of salt. Stir in two tablespoons of caster sugar. Cautiously mix in an egg yolk and a little cold water, until the pastry comes together. Leave it to rest, cling-filmed, in the fridge for an hour. Preheat the oven to 200oC. Roll out two-thirds of the pastry and use it to line a normal-sized pie tin. Pile in 500g strawberries, hulled and cut in half, and 50-75g caster sugar (depending on the ripeness of the strawberries). Roll out the rest of the pastry and use it to cover the pie, pinching the edges together and sealing them with the tines of a fork. Brush with beaten egg mixed with milk, sprinkle with caster sugar, pierce it with a fork and bake on a tray in the oven for 15 minutes, before turning the heat down to 160oC for another 25-35 minutes, or until golden brown and splendid-looking. Wait for it to cool to lukewarm, and then serve, as Hopkinson says, "with clotted or whipped cream". This would be the perfect thing to eat while watching one of the Wimbledon finals.
