Why the edible spoils from a trip home make meals so much sweeter

Half a kilo of lancashire cheese, two packets of bacon, Marmite, caramel wafers and a box of 240 Yorkshire teabags is standard packing when I return to Rome from England. Everything is wrapped first in a bag, then in an item of clothing, before being lined up in my bag, with books as dividers.

How these items fare varies. Sometimes, I unpack a seemingly neater pile than the one I packed. Other times, I pull bent cheese, crushed wafers and a box with corners like a boxer’s nose from a bag that has seen too many conveyor belts. I once tried bringing fresh gooseberries home, too, because they are almost impossible to find in Rome. Having packed them tightly in a plastic box lined with kitchen towel and placed at the top of my hand luggage, I hoped they would travel in comfort. Neither of us did, and I ended up throwing them away, furtive and wasteful.

Before I returned home this month, I did enjoy gooseberries in England, mostly from the bushes in my parents’ garden, which are small but provide an abundance of fruit, if you can get past the hairy thorns on the stems and the backs of the leaves. The skins are slightly hairy, too, both the pink variety and the pale green ones with white ribs that look like veins behind thin skin.

The earliest record of gooseberries in England is said to be a fruiterer’s bill from the court of Edward I, dated 1276, for gooseberry bushes imported from France, where they were often served with oily fish. This explains the name: groiseille à maquereau, or mackerel currant. The English name, however, is either a derivation of the Dutch kuisbes, or from the association of this sharp fruit with the fatty meat of goose. There is another association, of course: of being the third wheel between a couple who would otherwise be getting along much faster if they didn’t have a gooseberry at the table, talking about Isle of Wight tomatoes and asking who’s getting the next round in.

Then there is the gooseberry as a fool: a simple mixture of mashed berries, raw or cooked, mixed with cream and served from a cold glass bowl on a hot day. Felicity Cloake has a foolish masterclass (pictured top), which she promises is stupidly quick and easy to knock up. Meanwhile, in her Four Seasons Cookery Book, Margaret Costa suggests adding grated orange rind to fool, as well as one or two small teaspoons of the aniseed aperitif Pernod. Costa has rhubarb fool in mind, but I think her suggestion also works with gooseberry fool. I suggest adding only the one teaspoon of Pernod, so the aniseed flavour is barely recognisable – but everybody notices the fool is curiously delicious.

Another option for hairy berries is Anna Higham’s gooseberry and elderflower clafoutis, with the pale green-yellow balls looking a bit jaundiced but lovely set in a soft batter. Yotam Ottolenghi has a reliable recipe for gooseberry crumble fool, but he also pairs the berries with red chilli, cabbage, carrots, fresh ginger, lime juice and a splash of fish sauce in a punchy slaw, which he notes goes well with fried chicken, slow-cooked lamb, tofu or mackerel fillets. Nigel Slater has good advice for cooking mackerel, as does Tamal Ray. Nigel also has a tempting carrot and cucumber pickle, which could have a few gooseberries added to it; he also suggests a gooseberry flapjack slice, which he describes as a crumble, shortbread and flapjack all rolled into one.

Meanwhile, the bacon did make it home and in perfect condition. It will be for sandwiches, and for the clever recipe that is Rosie Sykes’ bacon and egg pie – a recipe she learned from her New Zealander mum, who would make it for picnics and wrap it in newspaper to keep it hot until lunchtime. I think Nigel’s pickle would be a good partner for Rosie’s pie, as well as for Simon Hopkinson’s lancashire cheese and onion pie (as modified by Felicity Cloake), which is one of the greatest pies of all time, and made even better when followed by gooseberry fool, or a cup of Yorkshire tea and a caramel wafer.

Edible history | Like many, I felt compelled to reread The Country Girls Trilogy after hearing last month that Edna O’Brien had died, at 93. Lyrical, savage and funny, her magnificent trilogy is also full of food. From boiled egg with “a little knob of butter to moisten it” that Hickey makes Cait in the first chapter to the “fucking potato cakes and barley soup to remind him of his martyred mother” in the epilogue, the three books are full. Iced buns, warm gin, tinned peas, homemade advocaat and rashers of bacon help us understand Cait and Baba, and remind us how much of the history we carry through our lives is edible.

New favourite | Some say that yufka may have been the earlier form of filo pastry. Like filo, yufka is unleavened dough rolled into paper-thin sheets and used to make flatbreads, pastries and pies, notes Özlem Warren in Sebze, her excellent book of Turkish vegetarian food. In Turkey, yufka is homemade (which takes skill, patience and a very big table), or bought in three ways: fresh, frozen or dried. I was delighted to find frozen yufka in Rome, and to learn that it can be used to make börek so good and quick that I now feel about yufka the way I used to feel about cigarettes: I never want to be without a packet in reserve.

The more rumpled, the better | A highlight is the easy herb and cheese börek from Özlem’s book. You layer yufka or filo in a frying pan, brushing with olive oil as you go, then press on a filling of feta, herbs and onion, before topping with another couple of sheets of pastry – the more rumpled, the better. You then treat the whole thing like a slow-cooked omelette, frying first one side, then the other. Both sides crisp while the filling melts within, and the result is divine.