Cooking Light Subscription: Gooseberry Recipes

Gooseberry Recipes

Gooseberry and strawberry rough-edged tart: One of the easiest tarts you'll ever make. Photograph: Colin Campbell for the GuardianStrawberries are not the only fruit; they're not even the only summer berries. I will always be very happy to eat them – good ones, grown here in the UK and properly ripened, at any rate – ut luscious, fragrant and versatile as the little red mouthfuls can be, they should never be allowed totally to clipse their berry brethren. As picking season gets under way, I find myself just as excited about the other star rries in our native fruit firmament, and I'm going to tell you about them over the next three weeks, rting today with gooseberries.Usually a soft, pale green, but sometimes golden, or even tinged a gorgeous wine-red, these tely bristled little fruits are under-appreciated these days. I think this is because they require a little work rom the cook, beyond wash and gobble. But that is more than repaid by what they give in return. Few mmer ruits rival the goosegog when it comes to complexity, depth and sheer zesty oomph.These aracterful berries have a long association with British cooking. Way back in the 1600s, herbalist Nicholas Culpeper talked of them being scalded, baked or eaten raw; there are recipes for them in Hannah Glasse's Art Of Cookery (1747), in Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery (1845) and Mrs Beeton's Book Of Household Management (1861).