Over Charcoal: The Strawberry

To kick off a new series exploring seasonal British ingredients, we asked Georgina Fuggle to come up with a set of recipes that make the most of the EGG’s many cooking modes and the unique size and flavour of British strawberries at their high summer peak. Her task was to show how fire-cooking can elevate even the most seemingly unimprovable of ingredients, balancing their intense sweetness with a touch of char or a lick of smoke. Her suggestions are warm sunshine on a plate: a salad of charred strawberries with roasted beetroot and goat’s cheese, a pavlova topped with gently smoked berries, and a galette – a classic free-form French pastry – filled with caramelised strawberries.

Just like the Big Green Egg, our strawberries draw their DNA from the other side of the Atlantic. The wild European strawberries eaten by our ancestors were small, sparse and impossible to cultivate. After the colonisation of the Americas, two promising New World species were brought back to Europe – one from North America, one from South America. In the late 18th century, a French horticultural prodigy, Antoine Duchesne, working in the royal gardens of Versailles, discovered that by crossing these two plants he could create fruits that were impossibly fragrant, fat and prolific. British growers then selectively bred the new hybrid, Fragaria ananassa, to create ever more attractive and saleable fruits. Almost every strawberry consumed here stems from this collision of two different species from two different continents, transplanted thousands of miles to a third.

Georgina is a chef, food stylist and writer. Trained at Leiths in London, she first made a splash as half of the Hart & Fuggle partnership whose pop-up restaurants and supper clubs garnered an enthusiastic following, drawn to vibrant food and atmosphere. She has written and contributed to several cookbooks as well being a regular presence in numerous magazines. Her approach is perfect for outdoor dining: big, bright, flavour-packed dishes, ideal for sharing, leaning on beautiful ingredients rather than complex techniques.