EUROPEAN GOOSEBERRY & WAX CURRANT
August 21, 2022
It was great to visit my brother in my hometown. We did so many fun things including a monster truck rally, visiting Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild, boating on Lake Placid and sapphire mining.
Big Sky sunsets are stunning.
We stomped around the mountains and found many huckleberry bushes but very few ripe berries.
Along the way we went to Elkhorn, a 19th century silver mining ghost town where we found gooseberry and currant bushes.
Botanical Description
Ribes uva-crispa
EUROPEAN GOOSEBERRY
Thorny shrub native to Europe, the Caucasus and northern Africa. Leaves are rounded and divided into three to five shallow lobes which are toothed along the edges.
In spring, clusters of small, nodding flowers with strongly recurved, pink petals emerge which are followed by round berries with a characteristically long, dried flower remnant at the end, small, bristly hairs on their skin and tart flesh.
The berries are usually green, but there are red, purple, yellow, and white variants, and all are considered to be tasty.
Ribes cereum
WAX CURRANT, SQUAW CURRANT
Thornless shrub native to western North America with fuzzy, glandular stems and lobed leaves like gooseberries. Leaves can either be hairless, or quite hairy, but usually studded with visible resin glands, particularly around the edges.
The inflorescence is a clustered raceme with small, tubular, white to pink flowers with sepals that curl at the tip.
Shiny round red berries also with a dried flower remnant at the end develop in the late summer. The fruit is less flavorful than the more commonly cultivated red current, Ribes rubrum.
An account of traditional uses of the wax currant by Native Americans can be found here.
Recipe
Gooseberry Currant Ketchup
I used Spicetrekker’s recipe and decreased the proportions, added a bit of salt and substituted balsamic vinegar for apple cider vinegar because it’s what I had.
- 1 cup gooseberries and currants, de-stemmed and washed
- 1/2 onion, chopped
- 1/2 cup water
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1 tsp garam masala
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1 1/2 tsp balsamic vinegar
Place berries, onions and water in a pot and bring to a boil. If foam appears, skim. Add sugar and spices. Reduce heat and simmer approximately an hour. Add vinegar, stir and remove from heat.
At this point I really felt like I had created a chutney, not a ketchup, so I blended the mixture. It was delicious on pork chops!
References
Calscape. (n.d.). Squaw Currant. https://calscape.org/Ribes-cereum-()
Native Plant Trust. (2022). Ribes uva-crispa — European gooseberry. https://gobotany.nativeplanttrust.org/species/ribes/uva-crispa/
Ribes cereum. (2022, August 1). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribes_cereum
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