England is still enjoying a heatwave. Whilst there are some places that are heavenly in hot weather, English cities generally don’t top that list, as I’m sure most of my English readers will attest to. London, for one, just isn’t set up to deal with serious heat; public transport has no aircon, offices often don’t either and nights are hot and sleepless (not in a good way).

One thing that does make an English summer in the city utterly worthwhile are readily available locally grown strawberries.

Whilst there’s a sweetness to them that is very hard to replicate when eating strawbs produced in different regions at sometimes unseasonal times of year, it is not impossible to. All you need to add is:

BLACK PEPPER

A liberal sprinkling of cracked black pepper on my strawberries from Ghim Moh market this lunchtime may sound madly eccentric but is a well known, albeit little practiced, trick and I promise really does – weirdly – bring out their flavour.

Just pour the cream and caster sug on top of your strawberries as usual and finish off with a few grinds from the pepper mill:

And it’s not just me. Ben Axford, former Master Chef finalist and creator of award winning Benjamin Chocolatier (but more importantly than all of that, my friend) reminded me of pepper on strawbs when we were back in Blighty a few months ago and won’t eat his any other way.