Classic American Strawberry Tart
For the Crust:
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (spooned and leveled), maybe from a family farm somewhere in Nebraska or Kansas with a mortgage and three kids still too young to drive the tractor, red paint flaking into prayers for rain on a hot July afternoon.
1/2 cup (1 stick) cold unsalted butter – one of the best is Irish butter from Kerry cows that graze the emerald fields of county Cork or green hills outside Belfast, not knowing North or South but only grass.
1/3 cup sugar, whose history is anything but sweet (See Barbados, History of; Haiti, Economic impacts of plantation system in; etc.).
1/4 teaspoon salt, probably from Nevada or Utah but once could have come from Tuzla, Bosnia, inhabited for more than 6,000 years, surviving war after war above warrens of solute mines, a city slowly sinking into its own history.
For the Filling:
1 bar (8 ounces) cream cheese, an American invention developed in 1872. Because it contains emulsifiers, many declare it not a true cheese, no matter the supple tang of it on the tongue.
3 tablespoons cornstarch, a carbohydrate extracted from the endosperm of corn used as a thickener. Discovered in 1840 by Thomas Kingsford in Jersey City, New Jersey, for the first ten years it was primarily employed as commercial laundry starch.
1/2 cup sugar, levelled. Native Hawaiians cultivated sugar cane (originally from New Guinea) for centuries before western colonization. They chewed the canes for the sweetness and to keep teeth and gums healthy, an outcome not possible with industrial refined sugar exported with much profit and little aloha.
1 tablespoon lemon juice, 1/3 the amount contained in the average lemon. Originally from northwestern India, lemons can be grown in almost any tropical or sub-tropical region, such as California, where they thrived before being uprooted by what is now downtown Los Angeles.
Pinch of salt - this time try kosher salt. The designation indicates a more coarsely grained crystal that hasn’t been iodized, but pure salt is always kosher.
3/4 cup water or more if needed, which should be distinguished from the need for water.
1 1/2 to 2 pounds strawberries hulled and halved, trucked up I-35 from berry farms in Mexico, harvested by workers who live in cardboard and plywood shacks, whole families working long thirsty days. At night, the children dream they could be picked, nestled gently in crates, and driven across the border to succulent tables of abundance.
Sonnet for a Summer Garden
The July sun is a discus of heat
thrown across hopeful rows of tomato,
peas, carrots, corn, and weeds that seem to grow
faster than anything. I’d rather defeat
them when it is not so hot, but they pull
easy wet, and noon’s my irrigation turn.
So, bent between cool ditch water and burn
I tug, check for bugs, contemplate a full
harvest. So much can come from leaf and root.
This year I favor melons, grown
from buds to firm swelling rounds, like my own
belly stretching over its ripening fruit.
Come fall, what’s left here will be fair plunder
and you will slip my skin, become wonder.
(Previously published in the anthology easing the edges: a collection of everyday miracles, edited by D. Ellis Phelps, Friends of the Boerne Public Library, Boerne, Texas 2021. The anthology has first publication rights. All other rights reverted to the author, Sarah Colby)
Sarah Colby has an exuberant interest in making the ordinary luminous. She is currently working on a manuscript of poems gathered from her experiences and travels as a military spouse. Wife of a reluctantly retired Army Chaplain and mother to a son in the Navy, Sarah lives in San Antonio, Texas, where she mentors veteran/military writing groups and teaches in community-based writing programs.
For the Crust:
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (spooned and leveled), maybe from a family farm somewhere in Nebraska or Kansas with a mortgage and three kids still too young to drive the tractor, red paint flaking into prayers for rain on a hot July afternoon.
1/2 cup (1 stick) cold unsalted butter – one of the best is Irish butter from Kerry cows that graze the emerald fields of county Cork or green hills outside Belfast, not knowing North or South but only grass.
1/3 cup sugar, whose history is anything but sweet (See Barbados, History of; Haiti, Economic impacts of plantation system in; etc.).
1/4 teaspoon salt, probably from Nevada or Utah but once could have come from Tuzla, Bosnia, inhabited for more than 6,000 years, surviving war after war above warrens of solute mines, a city slowly sinking into its own history.
For the Filling:
1 bar (8 ounces) cream cheese, an American invention developed in 1872. Because it contains emulsifiers, many declare it not a true cheese, no matter the supple tang of it on the tongue.
3 tablespoons cornstarch, a carbohydrate extracted from the endosperm of corn used as a thickener. Discovered in 1840 by Thomas Kingsford in Jersey City, New Jersey, for the first ten years it was primarily employed as commercial laundry starch.
1/2 cup sugar, levelled. Native Hawaiians cultivated sugar cane (originally from New Guinea) for centuries before western colonization. They chewed the canes for the sweetness and to keep teeth and gums healthy, an outcome not possible with industrial refined sugar exported with much profit and little aloha.
1 tablespoon lemon juice, 1/3 the amount contained in the average lemon. Originally from northwestern India, lemons can be grown in almost any tropical or sub-tropical region, such as California, where they thrived before being uprooted by what is now downtown Los Angeles.
Pinch of salt - this time try kosher salt. The designation indicates a more coarsely grained crystal that hasn’t been iodized, but pure salt is always kosher.
3/4 cup water or more if needed, which should be distinguished from the need for water.
1 1/2 to 2 pounds strawberries hulled and halved, trucked up I-35 from berry farms in Mexico, harvested by workers who live in cardboard and plywood shacks, whole families working long thirsty days. At night, the children dream they could be picked, nestled gently in crates, and driven across the border to succulent tables of abundance.
Sonnet for a Summer Garden
The July sun is a discus of heat
thrown across hopeful rows of tomato,
peas, carrots, corn, and weeds that seem to grow
faster than anything. I’d rather defeat
them when it is not so hot, but they pull
easy wet, and noon’s my irrigation turn.
So, bent between cool ditch water and burn
I tug, check for bugs, contemplate a full
harvest. So much can come from leaf and root.
This year I favor melons, grown
from buds to firm swelling rounds, like my own
belly stretching over its ripening fruit.
Come fall, what’s left here will be fair plunder
and you will slip my skin, become wonder.
(Previously published in the anthology easing the edges: a collection of everyday miracles, edited by D. Ellis Phelps, Friends of the Boerne Public Library, Boerne, Texas 2021. The anthology has first publication rights. All other rights reverted to the author, Sarah Colby)
Sarah Colby has an exuberant interest in making the ordinary luminous. She is currently working on a manuscript of poems gathered from her experiences and travels as a military spouse. Wife of a reluctantly retired Army Chaplain and mother to a son in the Navy, Sarah lives in San Antonio, Texas, where she mentors veteran/military writing groups and teaches in community-based writing programs.
