Never wash strawberries or raspberries that are intended to be eaten as
_fresh_ fruit. If they are so gritty as to require this process, keep
them off the table. You will certainly ruin the flavor beyond repair
if you wash them, and as certainly induce instant fermentation and
endanger the coats of the eaters’ stomachs, if, after profaning the
exquisite delicacy of the fruit to this extent, you complete the evil
work by covering them with sugar, and leaving them to leak their lives
sourly away for one or two hours.
Put them on the table in glass dishes, piling them high and lightly,
send around powdered sugar with them and cream, that the guests may
help themselves. It is not economical perhaps, but it is a healthful
and pleasant style of serving them—I had almost said the only decent
one.
“But I don’t know who picked them!” cries Mrs. Fussy.
No, my dear madam! nor do you know who makes the baker’s bread, or
confectioner’s cakes, creams, jellies, salads, etc. Nor, for that
matter, how the flour is manufactured out of which you conjure your
dainty biscuit and pies. I was so foolish as to go into a flour-mill
once, and having seen a burly negro, naked to the waist, with his
trousers rolled up to his knees, stand in a bank of “fine family
flour,” a foot deep in the lowest part, on a July day, shovelling it
into barrels for the market, I rushed into the outer air a sicker and a
wiser woman.
I _know_ GOD made strawberries. “Doubtless,” says Bishop Butler, “HE
could have made a better berry, but HE never did!” The picker’s light
touch cannot mar flavor or beauty, nor, were her fingers filthy as a
chimney-sweep’s, could the delicate fruit suffer from them as from your
barbarous baptism. You would like to know who picked them. I should
inquire instead, “Who washed them, and in what?” I recollect seeing a
housekeeper, who was afflicted with your inquiring turn of mind, wash
strawberries in a wash-hand basin!