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I’ve never understood people who can walk past a shelf of old Pyrex without at least slowing down for a look. Even if you’re not a serious collector, those stacks of unapologetically pink, turquoise, yellow, and patterned bowls are difficult to ignore. And if you spot pink Pyrex covered in little sprays of berries and leaves, I’d definitely take a closer look.
You may have found Pink Gooseberry, one of the most recognizable and collectible Pyrex patterns of the 1950s and ’60s. Gooseberry was introduced in 1957 and produced through 1966, and the pink version appeared on mixing bowls, casseroles, and refrigerator dishes. Individual pieces turn up, but an intact four-bowl nesting set is a particularly nice thrift-store find.
What Pink Gooseberry Pyrex looks like
via eBay
Pink Gooseberry is pretty easy to recognize once you’ve seen it. The repeating print consists of stylized gooseberries, little flowers, leaves, and curling stems. It has that wonderfully optimistic mid-century look where even a mixing bowl apparently needed to be cheerful.
The classic Cinderella mixing-bowl set alternates its colors. The smallest #441 and the #443 bowls have pink decoration on white glass, while the #442 and largest #444 reverse it, with white Gooseberry decoration against a pink background. The contrast is what makes a complete stack so distinctive. You don’t just get four identically patterned bowls in different sizes. The pink and white switch back and forth as the bowls nest together.
Gooseberry also came in black-on-white and black-on-yellow versions, but the pink variation has become particularly popular with collectors. It’s also worth distinguishing Pink Gooseberry from some of the rarer vintage Pyrex patterns worth watching for. Pink Gooseberry was a standard production pattern rather than a tiny promotional run, so finding one isn’t quite the equivalent of uncovering buried treasure. Finding a really nice complete set is another matter.
Pink Gooseberry wasn’t only made as mixing bowls
The four Cinderella bowls are probably the pieces most people picture, and they’re numbered #441 through #444. The smallest #441 holds 1 1/2 pints, followed by the 1 1/2-quart #442, 2 1/2-quart #443, and the big 4-quart #444. Cinderella bowls are easy to identify because of those flared sides, with one end functioning as a grip and the other as a pouring spout. (pyrexlove.com)
But don’t dismiss Gooseberry just because what you’ve found has a lid rather than a spout. The pink pattern was also used on the 470 and 480 series of Cinderella round casseroles, which came with clear glass lids. There was even a pink-on-white 500-series refrigerator storage set.
That gives collectors quite a bit to chase. You can build out a Pink Gooseberry collection well beyond the four nesting bowls, and matching lids matter with the casserole and refrigerator pieces. A loose casserole is still a lovely find, but finding the correct vintage lid sitting underneath it on the thrift-store shelf is much better.
I’d also look closely at condition before getting too excited. Older printed Pyrex can show fading, scratches, and areas where the decoration has worn away. The color and print are a large part of the appeal here, so bright pink with a crisp Gooseberry design is much more desirable than a heavily scrubbed example with half its berries missing.
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A complete nesting set is the find collectors really want
One Pink Gooseberry Cinderella bowl is collectible. All four together are much harder to stumble across.
A complete set consists of the #441, #442, #443, and #444 bowls, and they should have that alternating color scheme: pink on white, white on pink, pink on white, then white on pink. That’s worth remembering because thrift and antique stores sometimes assemble “sets” from individual bowls that weren’t originally sold together.
The difficulty is simply survival. These were working kitchen bowls, not ornaments. Over nearly 70 years, sets got split between family members, individual bowls broke, pieces disappeared into different cupboards, and countless examples were scratched or faded through ordinary use and washing. Consequently, getting all four correct sizes back together in similarly good condition becomes much harder than finding one stray bowl.
That’s also why complete Pink Gooseberry stacks attract so much attention from Pyrex collectors even though Gooseberry itself isn’t among the rarest patterns ever made. The appeal is partly the pattern and partly the satisfaction of having the whole original four-piece set.
So, if you’re rummaging through a thrift store and notice one pink-and-white berry bowl, check the entire shelf before you leave. Look behind the plates, underneath the other mixing bowls, and on any separate cookware shelves. Somebody may have split the stack while pricing or displaying it. Finding one Pink Gooseberry bowl is good. Finding its three nesting companions nearby is the sort of thrift-store luck I’d be talking about for quite a while.
