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Gooseberry Cakes
Put some green gooseberries in a jar, and place it in a saucepan of boiling water. Simmer until the fruit is soft, then press it through a sieve, and mix one pound of powdered sugar, and the whites of two eggs, beaten to a froth, with every pound of pulp. Beat thoroughly. Put the mixture, in small round cakes, upon sheets of paper. Place these on dishes before the fire, and when sufficiently dry, store them in tin boxes, and keep them in a dry place. Time, about one hour to simmer the goose-berries.
This is a fruit meringue drop of a type common in English confectionery books, but the method has no cooking step for the egg and no controlled drying temperature. The notes below explain where it fails rather than how to rescue it.
- The egg white is never cookedThe gooseberry pulp is cooked, but the two raw whites are folded in afterwards and the cakes are only dried. Nothing in the process brings the egg to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and drying before an open fire holds the mixture for hours in exactly the warm range where bacteria multiply.
- Fireside drying is not an oven"Before the fire" means radiant heat at an unmeasured, uneven temperature, with one side of the dish far hotter than the other. There is no way to state a modern equivalent because the original gives no target and the outcome depended on the hearth.
- Then stored for weeksThen stored with no stated limit -- The cakes go into tin boxes and are kept in a dry place; the recipe sets no time. Sugar at a pound per pound of pulp does lower water activity considerably, but only if the drying was thorough, and "sufficiently dry" is judged by eye alone. Under-dried cakes stored warm are a poor risk.
- Pasteurised whites do not fix itSubstituting pasteurised egg white removes the raw-egg problem but leaves the drying and storage problems untouched. If you want gooseberry meringue drops, use a current recipe with an oven temperature and a stated drying time.
- On the ingredient itselfGreen gooseberries are unripe fruit, picked hard and very sour in early summer; they carry a great deal of pectin, which is why the pulp sets so firmly with sugar. Cooked pulp pressed through a sieve is fine as a base for jam, curd or fool, all of which involve real cooking.
- "A jar in a saucepan of boiling water"This is a bain-marie, which keeps the fruit from catching on direct heat. An hour is a long simmer by modern standards, but gooseberry skins are tough and the point is to break them down completely for sieving.
Gooseberries were one of the great fruits of the nineteenth-century English kitchen garden, grown competitively in the north of England by working-men's gooseberry clubs and available in quantity for only a few weeks in early summer. That glut is the whole reason for a recipe like this: pulp, sugar and egg white turned a perishable crop into something that would keep in a tin until winter. The technique — a fruit purée lightened with beaten white and dried slowly to a crisp — is the same one behind the older "fruit cakes" and "fruit chips" that appear in English cookery from the seventeenth century onward.