How to Make your Urine Smell of Violets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They're fiddly to pick - I guess it would take most of the day to pick enough for a jar of jam - but sun-warmed wild strawberries Fragaria vesca have a wonderful flavour and aroma that's superior to the taste of most chiller-cabinet cultivated strawberries from the supermarket. According to the herbalist John Gerard, writing in 1597, ripe strawberries "quench thirst, and take away, if they be often used, the rednesse and heate of the face" - just the thing, then, if you're baking in the sun watching the tennis at Wimbledon. On the other hand, if it's raining, he also recommended water distilled from the plant mixed with white wine for "reviving the spirits, and making the heart merry" which I suspect had more to do with the wine than with the plant. Writing nearly 180 years later, the botanist and physician William Withering was clearly a strawberry devotee: "The berries either eaten alone, or with sugar, or with milk, are universally esteemed a most delicious fruit. They are grateful, cooling, subacid, juicy, and have a delightful smell. Taken in large quantities they seldom disagree. They promote perspiration, impart a violet smell to the urine, and dissolve the tartarous incrustacions of the teeth." The British native wild strawberry played no part in the parentage of the cultivated strawberry - which is a hybrid of North and South American species that you can read about here - and by the time that he wrote this, in 1776, Withering may well have been eating the much larger fruits of the New World species, which by then had become popular.