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The ruby jewels of June

It's local-strawberry bliss, glistening under a chocolate robe, perched atop vintage shortcake.

Strawberry shortcake at the Oyster House, from an 1847 recipe thought to be one of the first recorded for the cake in the United States. (MICHAEL S. WIRTZ / Staff Photographer)
Strawberry shortcake at the Oyster House, from an 1847 recipe thought to be one of the first recorded for the cake in the United States. (MICHAEL S. WIRTZ / Staff Photographer)Read more

The man with the hand truck - Ian Brendle, by name - had it tipped back, the better to negotiate the threshold at the eatery called Noble, on Sansom Street west of 20th.

If you'd come from a lunch of salt oysters and pickled vegetables at a bar nearby one recent day, and ambled west, you might have encountered that hand truck just before it ducked inside.

It was stacked with boxes of local produce, the top one open, showing heaps of strawberries that glistened in the midday sun.

Could Ian Brendle - he was from Green Meadow Farm in Lancaster County - spare a strawberry or two?

Of course, he would be happy to.

They were still at their peak, sweet, juicy, abidingly tender, the tastier for their unexpected appearance - Edenic apples beside the asphalt, berries from heaven.

So goes the season of strawberries; it straddles spring's end and summer's start, arriving tart, ending (slightly) sour. But in between, they're a valentine, the Lancaster and Jersey berries full of the ephemeral strawberry-ness that the ruinous demands of shelf life and shipping from California put in second place, or down even a few rungs from that.

They polka-dot the city. At Lore's Chocolates, Seventh and Chestnut, a particular dark chocolate-covered strawberry makes its secret cameo. Only on Wednesday, like one of those flowers that blooms for a day and is gone.

This is not what you think of, typically, as a chocolate-dipped berry. What Lore's does is roll the strawberry in a fondant sugar, then coat it with chocolate; the berry's acidity converts the sugar to a cordial syrup. Customers in the know have standing orders: Every Wednesday!

Why one day? The syrup has a viscosity that seems thinner than water, and after a single day it is rare that it doesn't find an invisible channel and seep out the bottom.

You can freeze them. But Tony Lore, the owner, doesn't encourage it: "It's not the same." Some things are meant to be what they are. In the moment. Then done.

The local season is dwindling. But late-season local strawberries are actually part of the personality of the strawberry shortcake that chef Ted Manko strongly - insistently? - advises you to try at the end of your meal at Oyster House, 15th and Sansom.

Manko cooks seafood, frying Ipswich clams and grilling bluefish. But he's a closet pastry chef. He baked with his mother. He baked with old recipe books. And when he decided to put strawberry shortcake on the menu he reached back, way back, to a recipe (circa 1847) from Eliza Leslie, whose career as a prolific cookbook author in Philadelphia is legendary.

He tweaked the recipe (his shortcake isn't iced, as in the original). But it follows Eliza Leslie's general guideline - thought to be one of the first recorded for strawberry shortcake in the United States.

Flour and butter and eggs and raw sugar for the biscuits. Warmed, end-of-season strawberries and sugar to create a syrup into which fresher berries are sliced just before serving. Subbing for the icing? Crème fraîche and confectioners' sugar (not Leslie's loaf sugar) and a generous dose of vanilla for the topping.

In the end, it is the classic shortcake - not a spongy thing, or hardtack, but a cakey biscuit having more in common with a scone, just not quite as crumbly or heavy, and with more flakiness.

It arrives after the fried clams and slaw, two other American beauties, and is unexpected - as the Noble berries were - in its purity of line and directness of flavor.

It poses on the counter, the berries red against the gray-white marble. The biscuit is warm and tender, the syrup soaking its lower half, the fresh berries tumbling from the split.

A restrained shred of mint adds a snap to the cream spooned over the top; not so much sweet as it is plumply lush and dense.

Toward the end of (real) strawberry season, it is a memory of the best of times - and a reminder not to fiddle with things done well.

Like the salt oyster, or the strawberry from just down the road, ripe for the picking from a passing hand truck - or posed simply for its star turn, winking from just-baked shortcake.