Goosegogs

Lucienne gave me the key to her garden yesterday so that I could pick the gooseberries from her long-neglected gooseberry bush. You never, ever see gooseberries here -- they are so little known in France that they don't even have their own name. They have to borrow the name of redcurrants -- groseilles -- and are then distinguished by being called groseilles à maquereaux, because the only thing French people know about them is that les anglais eat them with mackerel. Which, unlike many things the French say about the English, is true

I was surprised Lucienne had them in the garden, and even more surprised to discover they were the rare red ones. We used to have a couple of bushes of these in our garden in the UK -- I never saw them anywhere else. Lucienne had found a recipe for gooseberry tart ("an English cake") in her mother's recipe book and carefully copied it out for me.

I'd forgotten how much work gooseberries are. First you stab yourself to bits picking them. Then you have to top and tail them. It may be less messy than stoning cherries, but it's incredibly tedious when your gooseberries are the size of ... redcurrants, for lack of watering. That's the entire crop in my photo.

I didn't follow Lucienne's recipe exactly, because I'm sure it was for tart green gooseberries. Instead I used my usual recipe for tarte aux myrtilles, adding no extra sugar because the gooseberries were very sweet, cooking it a bit longer, and pouring over a mixture of an egg and some crème fraîche. The goosegogs didn't make as much juice as myrtilles do, but it still looks very nice. A lot of work for one tart! Lucienne will get her share tomorrow.