Ground cherries go by several common names - I regularly hear ground cherry, husk cherry, cape gooseberry, golden gooseberry and pineapple tomatillo used for the same thing. They're small golden fruits in a papery husk that are ripe at the very end of a Vermont summer. They're not too sweet, great for snacking and I've seen them in jams, salsa, and as pie filling too. I've used them in a banana cream pie for a part-tropical part-local sort of flavor that was delicious.
But ground cherries have one big problem - lost of people eat them when they're not quite ripe. I've even seen them served in restaurants that way. For a fruit that isn't terribly sweet to begin with, you don't want them to be on the green side!
Some people describe the color of a ripe ground cherry as looking like an egg yolk. That's pretty much it. All golden - no green.
The other thing to look for is the husks turning ugly. The husks of a ground cherry make pretty little mini-lanterns as they ripen, and it's tempting to eat them in the pretty stage, but if those husks aren't dried out, brown, papery covers, the fruit probably isn't ripe. For some reason the husks look fairly nice in all the pictures I took, but that's a trick of the camera.
The good news is that ground cherries ripen quite nicely after being picked. They often fall off before they're ripe and when I harvest them, it's almost always from the ground beneath the plant (which might explain the name). This is particularly good news because in some areas of Vermont it's hard to get the fruits totally ripe before the danger of frost. No problem, lop off the plants and bring them inside to sit on newspaper and finish up the ripening process. If you buy a not-ripe pint from the market, let those sit for a while too.
I assume that there is also the danger of an over-ripe ground cherry, but I've never encountered one. After all the patience it takes waiting for them to be well and truly ripe, I don't let any sit about for longer than absolutely necessary.
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