Gooseberry Pie

Years ago I was greeted at the door of my present home by our neighbor, Mrs. Muir. I was not much more than a newly-wed but I had already ventured into the art of pie-making. Mrs. Muir carried a bowl full of gooseberries and she also supplied a recipe for making a pie with them. That was the first (and last) gooseberry pie I ever made. I loved that pie but I don't know if the passing of years had magnified it's goodness in the corners of my mind or if I was just hungry the day I ate a piece of it. Anyway, about four years ago I coaxed my husband into buying me a gooseberry bush. It received a preferred spot of ground right next to the rhubarb plant. I can imagine it having a few conversations with the rhubarb plant about who was the tartest and the rhubarb plant wondering if it was being replaced by something so pitifully small. It faithfully bore a few gooseberries, but not enough to make a pie, until this year when it came up loaded.

Yesterday my husband came in from the garden with my green strainer bowl, set it on the counter, then announced that he had a job for me. I thought it would be some peas to shell but, no, it was a bowl full of gooseberries. I'll get to it later, I thought. When I finally sat down to sort through the berries I picked one up to examine it's anatomy. It was a deep red (Mrs. Muir's berries were green) and it was bigger than a pea but smaller than a marble. I noticed it had a miniscule dried blossom on one end and a tiny stem on the other. Neither of these parts looked edible. I tried to pull off the stem but it was firmly implanted. So I tugged on the dried blossom and it likewise would not budge. I estimated there were six to eight hundred gooseberries in the bowl and I multiplied that by five minutes, the time it took me to get the little beastie free of it's encumbrances. I figured there must be a better way. I took a quick look in my sewing room and came up with some embroidery scissors and started snipping. It worked like a charm but I noted that you had to snip into the gooseberry to get all of the blossom off which allowed it to squirt some of it's innards onto my hands. Three hours later I had four cups of blossomless, stemless berries and one big mess. I can't, for the life of me, remember ever having to do that with Mrs. Muir's berries. She must have prepared them for me before she brought them to my door. No wonder she dug up that bush and replaced it with something more productive. Why don't these things carry warning notices? I would never have wanted a gooseberry bush if I had known they would be so much work.

So I made a gooseberry pie. I thought to myself, this may be the last one I'll make so I'll make it pretty. I did a lattice crust and I even used my rotary cutter and ruler to make the dough strips uniform. Now for you children who think their mother is losing her marbles, you may be right. They are about the size of a gooseberry.