Sack off the chocolate and savour them pure and unblemished, save for a 'slick of cream and sprinkling of sugar'. On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine — as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together.’ For Charles Ryder, the narrator of Evelyn’s Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited , these luscious fruits represented not only the sun-dappled nostalgia of an age long past, but a memory fecund with longing and lust.
In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles , however, the strawberry’s role in the heroine’s seduction is rather less subtle. Alec d’Urberville, the silver-tongued, but black-hearted cad, picks a ‘specially fine product of the ‘British Queen’ variety’ (say what you want about the fella, he knew his berries), then ‘stood up and held it by the stem to her mouth. “No — no!” she said quickly, putting her fingers between his hand and her lips.
“I would rather take it in my own hand.” “Nonsense!” he insisted; and in a slight distress she parted her lips and took it in.’ Things, as you may imagine, did not end happily for Tess.
Such is the strawberry’s eternal appeal, a fruit that mixes the sacred and the profane, the chaste and the lascivious, the coy and the delectably seductive. Because the strawberry seems engineered for licentious pleasure — buxom, soft and beguiling. Like the cherry and peach, two other nubile nymphettes, those curves are as much edible flirtation as th.