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Blackberry and Apple Fool
Put into a saucepan one pound of blackberries, one pound of apples, the juice and rind of a lemon, and half a pound of loaf sugar. Stew till the fruit is soft, then rub through a sieve, and add half a pint of good custard, mix together, fill some custard cups, and put little heaps of whipped cream on top. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A fool in the older sense: sieved stewed fruit loosened with egg custard rather than whipped cream folded through. The one thing to get right is the sieving — blackberry pips and apple skin have to be left behind, or the texture is gritty.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in hard cones or lumps, broken up before use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute; 8 oz (225 g) to 2 lb of fruit is a firm hand, so taste after sieving and hold some back if your blackberries are ripe.
- Half a pint of custardAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups (285 ml). "Good custard" here means a proper stirred egg custard — crème anglaise — not a fruit-flavoured cornflour sauce.
- The applesPeel and core them and cut them small so they collapse at the same rate as the berries. A cooking apple such as Bramley breaks down to a purée; a firm eating apple will stay in pieces and fight the sieve.
- The lemon rindPare it in wide strips with a peeler rather than grating, and lift the strips out before sieving. Grated zest passes through and leaves a bitter speckle in a pale fool.
- SievingUse a nylon or stainless sieve and a wooden spoon or ladle; blackberry juice will take a dull grey tinge from unlined tinned or iron mesh. Expect to discard a good handful of pips and skin.
- Temperature when mixingLet the purée cool to at least lukewarm before the custard goes in, or the eggs will curdle and the fool will look grainy. Chill the filled cups for two hours before topping with the cream.
- YieldTwo pounds of fruit plus the custard makes roughly 1½ pints of fool — six generous custard cups, or eight small glasses.
- The cost line1s. 6d. is the shopping total in pre-decimal money, quoted so a cook could price a menu. It has no bearing on the method.
"Fool" as a dessert name is recorded in English from the sixteenth century, and its origin is usually given as the French fouler, to crush or press, though that link is traditional rather than firmly documented; contemporaries treated the word as a light-hearted nonsense name, like trifle. Early fools were fruit beaten into thick cream or custard, and it is only later that the cream-only version became standard, which is why this Victorian recipe reaches for custard first and uses whipped cream merely as a garnish. Blackberry and apple is a hedgerow pairing of convenience as much as taste: both ripen together in late summer and early autumn in Britain, the berries were gathered free from lanes and commons, and the apples supply the pectin and body that blackberries alone lack. Cassell's places it among the fruit sweets of the general household repertoire, cheap enough to note at 1s. 6d. and made in individual custard cups in the fashion of the period.