Thursday, May 17, 2012

Gooseberry Fool

Gooseberry fool is an English dessert dating back to the 15th or 16th Century. Basically it consists of gooseberries stewed with sugar, mashed or sieved and mixed with heavy whipped cream. I've never made it or eaten it, but this morning the phrase popped into my mind in a different, personal sense.

After the last gooseberry harvest had been stemmed and bearded the berries, they looked pretty in the Dansk colander I bought in 1958. (Turquoise was a popular color back then, remember?) These are wild gooseberries, which are much smaller than the domestic Pixwell. Many, many wild berries are needed to make a pie.


When I measured the berries to freeze for pie-making later, I was just 3/4 cup short of having enough for two pies. I wondered if we might have overlooked a few when we were picking, so I went back to the bushes in our front yard for a second look. Sure enough, we had missed quite a few, more than enough to finish out the second pie.

While I was picking the berries* I suffered several stab wounds from the thorns that line each branch of the bush. I took this photo with a macro lens, which greatly enlarges its subject. The thorns are about half an inch long and sharp as needles. They tend to grow in groups of three, protecting the branch from all sides.


Back to the house I went, with blood running down my hand, to fetch a bandage and the gloves I should have taken with me in the first place. It was at this moment I began to think of myself as a gooseberry fool. What kind of nut would suffer this pain, disfigurement and labor for a few gooseberries?

Now there's more stemming and bearding to be done.** Each berry has to be trimmed at both ends. We used to do this with fingernails, but my finger joints are too far gone and last year Dennis hurt his thumbs while doing the entire harvest by himself. Loath to give up gooseberry pie, I came up with a solution: snip the stem and beard using scissors with pointed blades. This method takes just as much time but protects hand joints.  In this photo you see why it's important to remove the "beard," which is the dried up gooseberry flower petals.


When I was a girl my dad brought in buckets of wild gooseberries. After supper our family – children, parents and grandparents – sat around the kitchen table, stemming and bearding gooseberries and talking. This as well as other occasions such as snapping green beans or shelling peas, were times to tell family stories or, if it was a presidential election year, speculate and argue about who each party would nominate. (My dad was a Republican, my mother a Democrat, making for a lively discussion.) Few occasions in contemporary life offer these benefits. Maybe those happy memories made me the gooseberry fool that I am.

Now that I have more than enough berries for the second pie, I may try my luck at making gooseberry fool. I think I know how that dish got its name.

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*There's a technique to picking gooseberries. Using a gloved hand, grasp a main branch from its top and lift it. Most of the berries will dangle and are relatively easy to pick. Each main branch has side branches. Let your eye travel from the tip of the main branch, picking as you go. When you reach a side branch, pick those berries. Then back to the main branch and so on. Keep holding the main branch up until you have picked the berries from every side branch.

**One important note if you're going to try this at home: do not wash the berries before stemming and bearding them. Wash them afterward. Otherwise the stems and beards will stick to the berries and you'll have a heck of a time getting them off.

3 comments:

Jayhawk Fan said...

I remember that Papaw always received a gooseberry pie for his birthday, and I was always disappointed, because as a child, I couldn't fathom why anyone would want to eat such a sour-tasting pie! I also remember helping to shell peas and husk the corn at Bates City. I have such wonderful memories of those times!

LawrenceLinda said...

Can you cook gooseberries and then strain them for the pulp WITHOUT taking the ends off? Would the ends spoil the flavor?

Shirley said...

The ends don't spoil the flavor. In fact some people leave the beards on, but I find them unsightly. Certainly it would be worth trying with a few berries.