Last week, my friend Deb and I picked these berries (20 pounds total!) in about an hour at Middletown's Sweet Berry Farm, the place which every year seems to me to have the sweetest, reddest, best-tasting berries around. (Other great places I can personally vouch for are Four Town Farm in Seekonk and Schartner Farms in Exeter.) While the going rate for they-picked berries at most farmstands seemed to be around $5.50 this season, these "picked-them-ourselves" berries were $1.79 a pound, as long as you picked at least ten pounds, which Deb and I made sure we did.
With my berries, I made three pies -- two of my family's ancestral recipe for a glazed pie, and one double-crusted strawberry-rhubarb (a favorite of my Retired Guy, who finds the ancestral recipe too sweet). I still had plenty more berries, and they weren't going to keep because they were so ripe and so full of water, so I didn't even wait till the next day to freeze the rest in containers (after slicing the berries and dusting them with sugar).
The ancestral pie recipe was allegedly discovered by my grandmother Zeller back in the '50s in a Ladies' Home Journal type of magazine, which printed it as a favorite of First Lady Mamie Eisenhower. Having terrible sweet-tooths, we all loved it, and the pie has been enshrined in family recipe boxes ever since. Unfortunately, as those boxes predate the internet, I'll have to type here the recipe as given by Mamie herself. Don't wait to make it, though. "Pick your own" berries are going by fast.
MAMIE EISENHOWER'S STRAWBERRY PIE
1 baked pie shell (supermarket brand is fine here)
1 generous quart strawberries
1 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
3 to 4 ounces softened cream cheese
1 cup cream, whipped and sweetened as desired
When the pie shell is cool, spread the cream cheese in the bottom, being careful not to break the crust. If you do, just cover over the break with some cream cheese. Put half (one pint) of the berries into a blender or food processor and puree them. In a saucepan on the stove, bring the puree to boiling, then add the sugar and cornstarch, which have been mixed together for ease of blending. Cook this mixture slowly, stirring continuously, for about ten minutes or until it loses the cloudiness from the cornstarch. Then place the hot saucepan in a sink of cold water to chill it. Meanwhile, place the other pint of whole, perfect berries on top of the cream cheese in the pie crust. Pour the cooled strawberry mixture over the top of the whole berries and spread it around to cover them completely. Refrigerate the pie, just to set it, and before serving, top with the sweetened whipped cream.
