RECIPE: Gooseberry Pie

Have you ever tasted a gooseberry? These unique, tangy fruits are related to currants but have a flavor all their own. Though gooseberries aren’t a common ingredient in pie, they’ll take your dessert to the next level.

The following is an excerpt from This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader by Joan Dye Gussow.

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Gooseberries have always had special meaning for me. When I was a child, our guests at every Christmas dinner were a family from my parents’ home state of Iowa, a mother with two unmarried daughters who had descended on Mom years earlier with an introduction from a remote cousin. The daughters were not much younger than my mother and, though both were childless, they were confident that they knew better than my mother how children ought to be raised. My sister and I were required to endure in silence their frequent critiques of our manners. What made the holiday dinner tolerable was that the mother of the family always arrived bearing German anise picture cookies and gooseberry pie.

Nothing I know of tastes anything like gooseberry pie. My first Christmas away from home, in 1950, with my whole family across the continent in California, I tried all over Manhattan to get fresh gooseberries. Finally, in the German section, I got two cans of gooseberries for a price which was, then, about 20 percent of a week’s salary. Well worth it. My recipe calls for fresh ones.

Gooseberry Pie

Ingredients

• 1 quart gooseberries, discarding soft ones and removing stems and tails
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 4 1/2 tablespoon flour
• 1/8 teaspoons salt

Procedure

1. Preheat oven to 450° F.
2. Combine sugar, flour, and salt
3. Sprinkle mixture over berries, stirring to distribute.
4. Turn berries into 8-inch pie crust, unbaked
5. Dot top with 2 tablespoons butter
6. Roll pastry for top crust, and cut a design for steam vents.
7. Brush edge of pastry with water.
8. Lay pastry over pie. Press edge together; trim.
9. Let rest 10 minutes, and flute the edge.
10. Bake in a 450° oven for 15 minutes or until crust is delicately browned. Then reduce heat to 325° and continue baking 20 to 30 minutes, or until berries are tender.

Note that I give no instructions for pie crust. Do what you want. Whenever I threatened to make a pie, my sons ran out of the kitchen screaming, “Watch out! Mom’s making a pie crust!” It remains a trying experience.

As I copied down this recipe, I remembered why people don’t use gooseberries. You have to have a strong taste-memory for the end result to be willing to sit around stemming and tailing them. And because the best kind of gooseberries for pie are green and sour to bland, you can’t snack as you go, as you can while taking the little green caps off strawberries. The end product is worth the work, though, and you can always clean gooseberries while listening to All Things Considered on National Public Radio.

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