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Aroma: absolutely unbelievable. Heady. Fragrant. Looks: extravagant. When your guests see it and taste it, their eyes will light up like you just presented them with a birthday cake – as if this were something rare and special. The truth is, if you tripped on your shoelace in the produce section, you’d almost certain fall directly into these three berries.

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Makes a lot more than 4 servings

Serve this with coffee and a muffin for breakfast, as a side to lunch sandwiches, as a snack on its own. Put it in your cereal. Berries are good for you, but you can fix that with a scoop of ice cream. Pair it with a scoop of frozen vanilla custard that is just soft enough so that it’s beginning to melt. You can die of a coronary with a smile on your face. (Or you can die as a bitter old man, munching raw broccoli. Your choice.)

The primary key to this salad is fresh, ripe, strawberries.  If you use the common type of strawberry that is nearly as crisp as an apple – the type that never really softens, never fully ripens, never turns a deep shade of red – this dish will be sad and disappointing. The blueberries will contribute more to this dish if they come from the same hemisphere you live in. Where I live, this means that I can make this dish mainly in summer.  Late spring, maybe. Fall and winter, no.

The secondary key is the cinnamon. You want only a touch, a hint. If you get it right, no one will taste “cinnamon.” Instead, the cinnamon will bring out a freshness, sweetness, and complexity in the fruit without anyone realizing that it’s there.

What You Need:

1 lb fresh strawberries, 6 oz. fresh blueberries, 1 Tbs sugar (or less, to taste), A pinch (less than 1/8 tsp) of cinnamon, 6 oz. fresh raspberries, 6 mint leaves (optional), chopped

How You Do It:

Hull and halve the strawberries. (Quarter any especially large ones.) Place them in a mixing bowl along with the blueberries. In a very small bowl (or a cup), mix the sugar and cinnamon. Sprinkle this mixture over the berries and gently toss until the sugar is mostly dissolved. Add the raspberries (and mint) and fold them in very gently with just a couple of strokes of the spatula, to roughly distribute the raspberries without overly disturbing them. Serve immediately.

If you don’t want to eat this right away, or if there’s any left over, refrigerate it. In time, it will get juicy. This might make it somewhat less appealing to eat as a straight-up fruit salad, but it will make it perfect for other uses: oatmeal, ice cream.

You may not feel like thinking of this as a salad, because “salad” makes it sound like you worked at it, plus it has no dressing. But you could work more at it, and produce a dressing. Search with keywords like “fruit salad strawberries blueberries raspberries,” and you’ll come across several types.

Berries on Oatmeal

Berries in a Bowl

Strawberries, Blueberries, Raspberries

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