the.com/gooseberry
a sour green marble that ripens into something almost embarrassingly sweet.
means A small, round, tart green or reddish berry with a translucent skin, used in pies, jams, and fools, and the spiny bush that bears it.
from The 'berry' half is plain enough, but the 'goose' is a long-standing puzzle. One popular notion ties it to serving the fruit in a sauce with roast goose, but that's likely a tidy after-the-fact story. It may instead come from a French word for the bush, groseille, reshaped by English ears into the familiar 'goose.' The honest answer is that nobody is certain why the goose got attached. The slang 'play gooseberry' — to be the awkward third wheel — is a later flourish, from the idea of a chaperone idly picking berries while a couple courts.
- third wheel
- British slang for an awkward romantic chaperone
- hairy variety
- some cultivars grow fuzzy, translucent skin
- banned crop
- once outlawed in US states over fungus fears
- giant contests
- England holds century-old competitions for heaviest berries
- color range
- ripens green, red, yellow, white, or purple
cape gooseberry — physalis peruviana, grown commercially in colombia and ecuador, wrapped in papery husk
indian gooseberry — phyllanthus emblica, used in ayurvedic medicine and popular in india for centuries
worcestershire sauce — contains gooseberry as key ingredient in the original 1837 recipe by lea & perrins