A couple of weeks ago, I started to see some unusually colored fruit the size of large, colorful golf balls. I didn’t know what they were, and so I made a mental note that they started with an “H” in German. unfortunately, I didn’t write the actual word down, though; all I recalled later was that it was s something like Hackelbeere or Hachelbeere or Hunckelbeere or Huckelbeere.  I remembered also thinking  to myself at the time that the word reminded me a little of the English word “huckelberry”.

I finally decided to buy some one day so we could try them, and also so I could remember to look up the word and figure out what they were.

The weekend I bought them happened to be the weekend we hosted our friend HD, who was visiting from Belgium.  HN is actually German, so I asked him to tell me the German name of the fruit.  However HD said he wasn’t sure. He thought they kind of looked like gooseberries to him, but that they were too large to actually be gooseberries,  or at least they were larger than the gooseberries he was used to.

Mystery berries bigger than an American quarter

But then he tasted one, and said, hmm, they actually do taste like gooseberries.

The problem was, in German the word for gooseberry is Stachelbeere. Which doesn’t begin with an “H”. And I was positive that the sign I’d seen for them in the market had had a word for them that began with an “H”.

So, HD, Chris and I all hunted through all the online and paper dictionaries we could find, and couldn’t come up with a single word for a gooseberry-like fruit that started with an”H”.  We decided it was a mystery:   perhaps there was a local term for these large gooseberry-like things that started with an “H” that wasn’t part of standard German. I vowed to check out the sign the next time I was in the market;  if necessary, I would then try to ask one of the vendors if these berries were indeed a type of Stachelbeere, but a local variety with a different name.

But then, the next week it seemed that these berries had disappeared from the market. There were no baskets of them in the stalls, and, crucially, no signs to check for the names. And I wasn’t about to try to ask one of the vendors about them without having the visual aid to reference — “Excuse me, I’m trying to find out the name that begins with an “H” for those things that didn’t quite look like gooseberries, but tasted like gooseberries, that were here in your stall last week, but aren’t here now, and no,  I don’t know what the sign said they were called.” Nope, I needed to wait until I saw them again.

Finally, last Friday, the berries were back! I even found them again at the original vendor where I’d purchased some. I quickly looked at the sign, ready to write down the word this time.  And you know what the handwritten sign said?

Stachelbeere.  

That’s right – they were just marked with the regular term for gooseberries after all.

But, in my defense, I only read the sign that way this time because I now know the word for gooseberries, and know that it starts with an “ST”, and not with an “H”. The actual sign in the stall was hand-lettered, and the initial “ST” ran together in a way that looked like an “H”. At least to me. Here’s my recreation of the sign to illustrate my point:

Artist rendition of the berry sign

OK, so once you know it’s an “ST” at the beginning, it’s hard to see that cluster as an “H”, even here. I was hesitant to take a photo of the actual sign, since I didn’t want to have to explain this story to the vendor, particularly since I didn’t want to buy any more, as I found them much too tart for my tastes.  😉

Anyway, I do believe I’ve found the solution to the mystery of the berry that doesn’t really begin with the letter “H”.  I still don’t know why they grow them so much larger around here than in other parts of Germany, though … but even Nancy Drew only solved one mystery at a time. 😉