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Currant Fool
Strip some fresh, ripe, red currants from the stalks, and stew them gently with three table-spoonfuls of sugar to every pint of fruit. Press them through a sieve, and when nearly cold mix with them finely-grated bread-crumbs and cream or new milk. Time to stew the currants, half an hour. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for four or six persons.
A Victorian fruit fool of the plainest kind: stewed currants, sweetened, sieved, and slackened with cream. The original leaves the crumb and cream quantities to the cook's judgement, which is the only real difficulty.
- The hinge: sieve while warmRedcurrants are all skin and seed, and the puree must go through a fine sieve before it cools and stiffens. Push it through with a wooden spoon or ladle; a pint of fruit yields roughly a cupful of thick puree, though this varies with the fruit.
- Quantities the recipe omitsFor each cup of sieved purée, start with about 1/4 cup fine dry breadcrumbs and 1/2 to 3/4 cup cream, adding cream until it drops thickly from the spoon. The crumbs are a thickener and extender, not a flavour, so err on the low side.
- Three tablespoons of sugar is not muchRedcurrants are sharply acid — modern palates will usually want 1/3 to 1/2 cup of sugar per pint of fruit. Taste the purée after sieving, while it is still warm enough to dissolve more sugar.
- Half an hour is longCurrants collapse in eight to ten minutes over low heat with the lid on; they release plenty of juice and need no added water. Extended stewing only drives off liquid and dulls the colour.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, straight from the dairy and unhomogenised. Whole milk works, but the fool will be thin and slightly grainy; cream, or half cream and half whole-milk yoghurt, gives the texture the dish is aiming at.
- Whipped or notCassell's has the cream stirred in plain, giving a pourable fool served in glasses. Folding in lightly whipped cream instead produces the mousse-like fool most people now expect; both have period precedent.
- Bread instead of creamIf the crumbs make the result pasty, they can be left out entirely and the purée thickened by reducing it a little further. The crumb version was the economical one; 6d for four to six people was the point.
- ServingChill at least two hours. Four to six small glasses, with thin crisp biscuits or shortbread.
"Fool" as the name of a dish of crushed fruit and cream is recorded in English from the sixteenth century, and is generally traced to the same sense of the word as trifle — something slight and of no consequence — rather than to any cook or place. Gooseberry was the classic fruit, but redcurrants were a common kitchen-garden crop and cheap in season, which is consistent with Cassell's costing this out at sixpence. The breadcrumbs mark it as the thrifty end of the family: enriched with cream it is a dessert, extended with crumbs and new milk it becomes a nursery or servants'-hall pudding.