English gooseberry, Chinese Gooseberry and Indian Gooseberry from Singapore's Little India

We bought what looked like giant gooseberries in Little India in Singapore, expecting to get the flavoursome gooseberries we were used to in England.

English Gooseberries
The English or bought in London gooseberries can have a slightly sour taste but when cooked up in a sugar syrup are delicious and highly flavoured, nice by themselves. You can add them to crumbles or fruit salad but they are a delicate distinctive flavour.

Chinese Gooseberries
We thought at first that what we had bought might be Chinese gooseberries. No. When I checked on line I realised that Chinese Gooseberry is another name for kiwi fruit, a totally different fruit, very popular in London sliced into fruit salads or as a decoration.

Indian Gooseberries
The fruit we bought in Little India in Singapore, it now became apparent, were Indian gooseberries. At first bite it was obvious they were not the same as English gooseberries. We found them quite horrid. No soft centre and seeds. Solid and tough to bite, liken an uncooked potato. Tasteless but slightly sour.

We tried cooking them up with a sugar syrup. (That sounds like a tautology. What other kind of syrup could you have if not sugar? You could have sugar from a fruit such as fructose, or from milk, called lactose.)

We tried to hide the result in a fruit salad for breakfast. Nobody was fooled. Nasty solid, hard to bite, nothing you could chew or suck. Am I being poisoned? I removed the solid, tasteless bits.

Indian Lady's Recipe Blog
I then tried searching the internet for enlightenment. I found it immediately. A lovely Indian lady recalls her childhood picking these fruits and eating them fresh. She claims they were juicy. She says the secret is to eat them with salt. Then sip water which by contrast tastes sweet.

The fruit we bought were not juicy. I hacked at them with a knife on a chopping board and had trouble cutting them. I thought that like everything else we had bought they would be ready to eat. Was I supposed to keep them ripening?

The fruit she says, is an acquired taste. I have acquired a taste for yogurt which I did not like the first time I tried it. I have acquired a taste for durian ice cream or durian cream or durian cake which I love, like a mixture of chestnut and banana, although I don't like fresh durians with their sulphurous bad egg flavour.

My Verdict
However, I have had two goes at fresh and cooked Indian gooseberry. Since we have a few left, we will try one last time with salt or pickling, or candying, the way we dealt with rock hard figs in London, which made delicious candied figs. After that, if you don't ever hear from me again on this subject, my verdict is, stick to fresh gooseberries from England or America.

On the other hand, if what we bought was not an Indian gooseberry - what was it? It is green, rock hard, with six segment divisions visible on the outer skin.

http://www.lovefoodeat.com/how-to-eat-indian-gooseberriesamlanellikai/

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer.