Gooseberry Fools

Wild gooseberries grow in the woods and along the woods’ edges. Because the bushes get so little sun, they produce very few berries. Remembering going gooseberry picking with my dad when we found a bush with lots of berries in a pasture, I asked Dennis to move some plants from the woods’ edge into the yard where they would get lots of sunshine.

He kindly transplanted three little native gooseberries He has heaped fertilizer in the form of horse manure on the plants. They, in response to sunshine and fertile soil, have quadrupled in size and this year they are heavily laden with the biggest wild gooseberries I’ve ever seen. Every morning for the past two weeks Dennis has gone out to pick our berries.

In the afternoon, when it’s too hot to work outside, Dennis clips the beards and stems from the berries. We rinse them and pack them into one-quart freezer bags. So far he has brought in two gallons of berries, and there must be at least another gallon still on the bushes.

When I was a girl my dad spent one day each June picking wild gooseberries in the woods. He always picked them green, and he picked them all at once. Everyone believed that if gooseberries ripened they would have no taste, so we ate green gooseberry pie.

Last summer Dennis hit on the idea of letting the berries ripen a bit before harvesting, and the results were very good.  Instead of eating green pie, we had beautiful reddish-purple pies. We also made lovely jam, tart but sweet.

Yesterday I made a gooseberry pie for my pal Barb’s birthday. She said that although her father’s favorite pie was gooseberry, she had never tasted it, possibly because of its unappealing color.

Now Barb’s a convert. She said, “I can’t believe I waited 74 years to eat gooseberry pie.”

Copyright 2016 by Shirley Domer