Tessalyn Morrison MD student
Red currants are important. Omi, my German grandma, taught me about them when I was a little girl. We’d toddle through her giant garden checking the status of the blackberries, gooseberries, and currants. They were swollen Chinese lanterns of sour, seedy goop. Deeper into summer, they became slightly sweet. A farewell to the firefly season. Omi taught Dad to make rote gruetze (“red groats”), which is a summer berry compote made with pearl tapioca and topped with runny vanilla pudding sauce. Somewhere else it’s probably a crème anglaise, but in our family, Jell-o pudding mix with extra milk will do. My sister and I would gather all the raspberries, blueberries, gooseberries, and currants from the yard and come back to my dad with armfuls full of berries, begging for rote gruetze to be made. My dad would reciprocate by reducing them in apple juice and jelling them with the pearled tapioca. Then we had to wait until morning for it to chill overnight. In the summer, there was no reason to
wake up early in the morning, unless there was rote gruetze. Without alarm clocks (...we were children), we’d wake with dawn and race each other downstairs to crack open the fridge. Dammit! Meredyth already got to it. I would compensate by taking twothirds of what was left and douse it with vanilla sauce, so that David wouldn’t get any. Dad woke up next, and David always woke up last. David didn’t like good things anyway. I would eat my rote gruetze at the kitchen table looking out, in rare fashion, at the sunrise in the backyard. I never remember eating rote gruetze with anyone. I always ate it alone, which looking back, is a curious thing for an 8-year-old to do. I would go to school. People would ask me what my favorite food is. I would say rote gruetze and everyone would look at me like I was a German freak. This look never improved throughout high school. Rote gruetze brought be closer to my Omi who thought it was cute that I liked to berry pick and make German recipes. She made me