Every morning, Nicolas Turon pays tribute to his department with a funny, tender and knowing text, in the form of a declaration of love for the Moselle. He chooses an emblem belonging to history or current events and treats it in an offbeat way.
Fleshy, red, desirable, tangy, we devour the strawberry without moderation, we delight in it, nay, we smear it! Plain, full of sunshine, with icing sugar, brown sugar, in sorbet, immersed in yogurt, in a fruit salad or sprinkled with a dash of lemon juice… Is there a greater pleasure than tearing it away from it? his little tail and bite his sweet flesh?
Barely started, we finish the tray, arguing the fact that the fruit does not keep long: the strawberry is a bit like the peony of fruits, it writes its beauty in evaporated letters.
If, in Moselle, the Woippy strawberry remains the best known, thanks to the festival which made it famous for a long time, local strawberry cultivation must be recognized as having a broader geography. A real part of our rural history; let’s take a quick tour of its history, following in the footsteps of the Woippy History Society, which I thank.
In 1868, Dominique and Jacques Vion, winegrowers by trade, brought back a few Ananas strawberry plants from a trip to Brest and transplanted them into the Woippycian land, where they quickly flourished: in the light of the First World War , we cultivate 125 hectares and a farmers’ union was created by the priest of the village. In the meantime, the strawberry has contagious the communes of northern Metz (Norroy-le-Veneur, Plesnois, Marange-Silvange, Saulny, Semécourt), where it advantageously compensates for the declining income of the vines affected by phylloxera…
