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Fruit Creams
Take half a pound of any kind of fruit. Stone fruit should be sliced and stoned; berries should be stalked. Boil with two ounces of sugar until quite tender, then rub through a sieve, and set aside to cool. Whip a quarter of a pint of thick cream to a stiff froth, and mix the fruit pulp with it. Pour the mixture into custard glasses, and serve. Probable cost, 1s.
A three-ingredient fruit fool in all but name, and it works exactly as written once the measures are translated. The whole thing hinges on the pulp being cold before it meets the cream.
- The quarter-pint of creamAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, or about two-thirds of a US cup; whipped, it roughly doubles. Use double or heavy cream at 36% fat or above — single cream will not whip at all, and lower-fat whipping creams hold a stiff froth less well against wet fruit pulp.
- Cool the pulp completelyWarm purée slackens whipped cream on contact and the mixture weeps in the glass within the hour. Chill the sieved pulp to refrigerator temperature, then fold it in with a spatula rather than beating.
- Half a pound of fruitAbout 225 g, which cooks down to roughly 150 ml of thick purée once sieved. Some fruits release far more liquid than others; if the pulp looks thin, reduce it in the pan for a few minutes before cooling.
- Adjust the sugar to the fruitTwo ounces (about 1/4 cup) suits gooseberries, damsons or currants. For ripe raspberries, strawberries or apricots, start with half that and taste — the cream mutes sweetness less than people expect.
- Rubbing through a sieveA fine nylon or stainless sieve and a flexible spatula does it; a food mill with the fine plate is faster. Avoid a blender, which drives seed fragments and skin into the purée and turns the colour muddy.
- Custard glasses and yieldThese were small stemmed glasses of 3 to 4 fl oz. The quantity fills four of them, or two modern ramekins as a generous dessert.
- ServingBest within a couple of hours; the purée slowly slackens the cream. Refrigerate until the moment of serving and, if you want it to hold longer, fold in only two-thirds of the pulp and spoon the rest over the top.
Cassell's is describing the dish English cooks have long called a fool — cooked, sweetened fruit folded into whipped cream — though the book files it under the neutral, descriptive heading typical of a dictionary of cookery rather than under a regional name. The gooseberry version is the oldest and best attested, appearing in English recipe collections from the seventeenth century onward, and the name is generally traced to the sense of "fool" as something trifling, though that derivation is traditional rather than proven. The costing of one shilling is printed as a matter of course throughout Cassell's.