There were very few things that my darling mother did just to please herself rather than everyone else in the family. However, the exception was her making of ghastly gooseberry pies. She loved those horrible, sour little fruits.
Source – Wikimedia
Our Tasmanian orchard was a bit of a disaster owing to curly leaf, crows and starlings, but of course the thorny little gooseberry bush thrived, 😨 My sister and I were sent out to pick the berries, then ‘top and tail’ them ready for cooking. Occasionally we would find a ripe one, which we ate on the spot, but it was the tart green ones Mum wanted.
Worse still, gooseberry pies had short crust pastry, not the buttery, flakey pastry we kids loved, and which Mum used on apple pies etc, I’m not sure whether she cooked the gooseberries first, as in this recipe, but it sounds very similar to the pies we were presented with.
Of course our pies were always in an oval, enamel dish like the one below.
Here we are, a slice of delight for Mum, the worst dessert in the world for me.
Only in Tassie would a child name gooseberry as part of their ‘dream dinner’. Admittedly it was a long time ago, but oh Edna Deane, what were you thinking?
Australian Town & Country Journal, 1903
GOOSEBERRIES….A CAUTIONARY TALE
When my siblings and I used to raid the cases of summer fruit Mum bought for bottling, she would tell us a horror story about one of her family’s neighbours at Reedy Marsh, near Deloraine. She said ‘Old Dolf’ died after eating too many egg plums, which fermented and blew up in his stomach. OMG, we were mentally scarred for life. I only wish I could have shown Mum this little piece in retaliation. I came across it in TROVE, dated 1898;
GOOSEBERRIES AND MILK – A FATAL COMBINATION
LAUNCESTON, January 7 1898
The Rev. Gordon Mackay, Presbyterian minister, died suddenly of peritonitis. Death was caused by drinking milk immediately after eating gooseberries.
Sorry Reverend, I couldn’t resist.
Dear me, there must have been a chemical reaction similar to the one that killed poor Old Dolf! Since we lived on a dairy farm the chances of us combining milk and gooseberries would have been alarmingly high.
We rarely hear of gooseberries these days, I wonder why? That’s a rhetorical question. 😎
FOR MORE ON THE GOOSEBERRY, INCLUDING THE RISQUE MEANING BEHIND THE SAYING ‘BORN UNDER A GOOSEBERRY BUSH’, CLICK HERE
I loved Gooseberries, tart or not, but if ever as children we dared complain, the response was always “there’s worse when there’s none”!
Well of course we did have to eat the wretched pie. The only thing I wasn’t made to eat was beetroot!