Gooseberry Fool

The gooseberry’s no doubt an oddity, an outlaw or pariah even—thorny and tart as any kindergarten martinet, it can harbor like a fernseed, on its leaves’ under- side, bad news for pine trees, whereas the spruce resists the blister rust it’s host to. That veiny Chinese lantern, its stolid jelly of a fruit, not only has no aroma but is twice as tedious as the wild strawberry’s sunburst stem-end appendage: each one must be between-nail-snipped at both extremities. Altogether, gooseberry virtues take some getting used to, as does trepang, tripe à la mode de Caen, or having turned thirteen. The acerbity of all things green and adolescent lingers in it—the arrogant, shrinking, prickling-in-every-direction thorn- iness that loves no company except its, or anyhow that’s what it gets: bristling up through gooseberry ghetto sprawl are braced thistles’ silvery, militantly symmetrical defense machineries. Likewise inseparably en- tangled in the disarray of an uncultivated childhood, where gooseberry bushes (since rooted out) once flourished, is the squandered volupté of lemon- yellow-petaled roses’ luscious flimflam— an inkling of the mingling into one experience of suave and sharp, whose supremely im- probable and far-fetched culinary embodiment is a gooseberry fool. Tomorrow, having stumbled into this trove of chief ingredients (the other being very thickest cream) I’ll demonstrate it for you. Ever since, four summers ago, I first brought you, a gleeful Ariel, the trophy of a small sour handful, I’ve wondered what not quite articulated thing could render magical the green globe of an unripe berry. I think now it was simply the great globe itself’s too much to carry. December 1981