Sobey’s had gooseberries from New Brunswick and I bought a pint of them on a whim, knowing absolutely, and I can’t stress this enough, nothing about how to eat or prepare them. But the internet and my mother had my back. Since this isn’t actually a recipe blog and I don’t give a shit about SEO, I will get right to the recipe and then bloviate about it afterwards.
Mix together and put in a greased small casserole dish:
- 1 pint of gooseberries, washed and stems and ends removed
- 1 tbsp white sugar
- 1 tsp water
Mix separately and put on top:
- 2 tbsp cold butter
- 1/3 cup flour
- 1/3 cup oats
- 2 tbsp brown sugar
- dash each of cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt
- forget to put in the 2 tbsp sugar and add it after five minutes of baking in a panic
Bake 30 minutes at 400°F.
This recipe is based on this pre-AI recipe from Where Is My Spoon, which has 1.5 lbs gooseberries. A pound of berries is about 3 cups, so that’s 4.5 cups, and I have 1.5 cups of fruit, which is a third of what I should have, so I just divided everything roughly into thirds, it’s a crumble, who cares. I tend not to want things as sweet as online recipes, so even though gooseberries can be rather tart, I lowered the amount of sugar. I also added oats instead of half the flour because if you don’t put oats in your crumble topping what are you even doing. Out of Old Nova Scotia Kitchens has a recipe for spiced gooseberries which had cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice. So I added cinnamon and nutmeg to my crumble mix, not loving allspice.
This is absolutely not important but I’m recording it for myself: Mum, after I told her I had gooseberries and we’d chatted about recipe ideas for a bit, mentioned that she wanted to get some huckleberries at some point to make huckleberry pie, and told me about her maternal grandmother singing her and her siblings a song that went h-u-eckle b-u-eckle, h-u-eckle eye, h-u-eckle b-u-eckle, huckleberry pie. (As far as I know, there’s no such adorbs song about gooseberries.) Also, because she loves me, she helpfully read me the instructions from OOONSK for how to skin an eel, which starts, “Nail the eel by the tail.” OOONSK is chockablock with these sorts of things—if you are Nova Scotian and don’t have it, you should absolutely pick up a copy.
I should probably also mention that Natal Day (today) is the day celebrating the founding of Halifax, although that did not happen in August (it was June 21, 1749) and it’s unclear why people from elsewhere in Nova Scotia, who also (mostly) get the holiday, should care, but we wanted a bank holiday between Canada Day and Labour Day, so.
