We have been feasting on strawberries. Each day, I walk to the strawberry seller at the end of our road and buy a kilo for 5 euros. A third of these I take with me for the children to eat on the way home from nursery. The rest we devour at the end of our evening meal – a great bowlful in the middle of the table, green stalks cast off on our dirty plates.

One of the most evocative fruits (though pedants among you will say they are not really fruits at all – bearing their seeds on the outside and being only accessories to these), summer without strawberries is hard to imagine. Quartered and sugared with a dollop of cream, or rinsed and left with the stalks on, the sight of these plump red jewels conjures up an array of images: a hot day in the fields with friends; the cool shade of the living room with the thwack of the tennis ball on the telly; scones with Granny as the summer rain drips down outside the art gallery window; pudding in the late fading light in the back garden; one more glass of warm Pimm’s by the river before the university holidays start.

My favourite dress as a child had strawberry buttons. Wearing it proudly to school (though distinctly not the uniform), I would revel in its exact appropriateness as I opened the old cream tub filled with homegrown strawberries at lunchtime. Years later, in that endless summer holiday between school and university, we illicitly harvested my parents’ big strawberry bed after late night parties, sobering up enough to carefully pick our way through the plants.

Strawberries are woven into European history. The Romans used them medicinally. Fourteenth century monks worked them into illuminated manuscripts. Images are found from then on in German, Dutch, and English art. But garden strawberries as we know them – plump, juicy and sweet – are not so ancient. They were first cultivated in France in the mid-eighteenth century, bred from a cross of strawberries from North America and Chile. It’s hard to know where to start with their nutritional properties (vitamin C, K, potassium, folic acid, manganese, fibre – need I go on?). Simply put: they are wonderfully good for you.

Many keen gardeners cultivate a few, often measly, plants alongside their vegetables and raspberry canes, but a strawberry bed the size of my parents is unusual. There were weeks in my childhood when our five hungry mouths could not match the supply; leftovers were frozen for winter desserts or turned into strawberry jam. This experience has undoubtedly skewed my strawberry requirements – I expect to eat them in great quantity and only at particular times of the year. A few watery ones, still green and white at the top, in a meagre punnet in winter will just not do.

For what better represents the fallacy of abundantly available fruit than an oversized strawberry in February. Flown in from halfway across the world, where it was grown in a vast field covered in polythene far far away, it arrives devoid of its nutritional value (too much weedkiller and too many hours in fridges) and any real taste. They’d be better renamed “plastiberries”.

My late grandmother’s oak bureau arrived in a shipment from England last week. As I cleaned off the dust from the otherwise empty object, I discovered a card nestling in a back drawer. On the front of the card was a beautiful picture of heavily-laden strawberry plants. I recognised it immediately: it was card I had sent from London in the summer of 2008. A happy coincidence. She loved strawberries – and the jam – too.

Strawberry Quark – if eating them plain is not enough …

Ingredients:

• A large punnet of strawberries
• A sprinkling of sugar (a tsp or two, depending on your preference)
• 200g tub of 40% fat quark (greek yoghurt will do, if you can’t find quark)
• A dash of milk

Method: 

Rinse the strawberries under cold water. Remove the stalks (and hull if you prefer) and quarter. Put into a large bowl. Sprinkle with sugar, stir gently, cover, and then leave for 30 minutes or longer in the fridge. Take out to stir again from time to time.

By now, the strawberries should have released some of their juices. Then it’s time to add the quark. Spoon in the entire tub, and pour over a little milk. Stir gently until all the strawberries are well covered with the quark and the milk is entirely mixed in.

Keep covered in the fridge until half an hour before serving.