Marinaded Strawberries

What you need

• 1 to 2 punnets of strawberries
• 2 tablespoons of Grand Marnier or Cointreau
• 2-3 drops of balsamico vinegar (at least 4 star, not the industrial stuff)
• a breath of cayenne pepper or very finely ground dried chillies

What you do

1. Put the Grand Manier into a small dish.
2. Add the drops of balsamico (which adds an acerbic note to the sweetness of the liqueur).
3. Sprinkle in the cayenne or ground chillies.
4. Half the strawberries and put them into a flat dish.
5. Add the marinade and leave for about 20 to 30 minutes, turning the strawberries once or twice.

Two remarks

Strawberries are mostly no longer in season in August, so this is more of a June/July dish. But there is a type of strawberry called mara des bois that grows all through the summer. The berries are relatively small and simply packed with a flavour very similar to wild varieties, hence the name. And I have been able to get them in the shops for the last few weeks!

About the marinade: when I was in Laos in January 2011, what intrigued me about fruit sold as snack in the market was that the mango slices, the papaya strips, the pineapple chunks and that type of fruit I’ve not seen anywhere else, a tiny apple-shaped, almost seedless delicacy with a lovely tart taste came with a small bag of sugar mixed with finely ground, dried chilli or chilli power. You dipped the fruit in there before eating it. This created a wonderful mix of tastes, the acidity of the fruit, the sweetness of the sugar and the head of the chillies.

As for strawberries, I had heard of adding a twist of freshly ground pepper to them before serving and when I tried it out I was amazed how much this enhanced their natural flavour, so I was curious about how the Lao idea of  seasoning, to combine as many of the flavours as the tongue is capable of detecting in one dish (incidentally, also a concept in molecular food, I am told), would work out. The added punch is the result of that curiosity.