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Gooseberry Cream
Pick the stalks and tops from about two pounds of green gooseberries. Wash, drain, and boil them until soft and broken, in a pint and a half of water. Press them through a sieve, and to every pint of juice add a pound of loaf sugar and the rind and juice of half a lemon. Let these boil all together for fifteen or twenty minutes, and, when cold, mix with them half a pint of milk, in which an ounce of isinglass or gelatine has been dissolved. Pour into a mould, and put it in a cool place until firm. This cream should be made the day before it is wanted. Sufficient for two quarts of cream. Probable cost, 2s. 6d., with best isinglass.
A Victorian moulded "cream" — the word here means a set, spoonable shape rather than anything containing dairy cream. The whole thing depends on getting the gelatine fully dissolved and the milk in cold.
- The hinge: add the milk coldThe gooseberry syrup is strongly acidic, and hot acid plus milk will curdle on contact. Let the fruit syrup cool completely, then stir in the gelatine-milk slowly, in a thin stream. If it does break, the mould will set streaky and grainy rather than smooth.
- Isinglass and gelatine are not interchangeable by weightIsinglass is dried sturgeon swim bladder, and its setting strength varied by grade. Modern powdered gelatine at 1 oz (about 28 g, or four standard 7 g sachets) to two quarts of liquid gives a firm unmoulding set; for sheet gelatine use the same weight, softened in cold water first and the water squeezed out.
- Dissolving the gelatineSprinkle the powder over the half pint (10 fl oz British measure, about 1¼ US cups) of cold milk and let it swell for five minutes, then warm gently until clear. Do not boil it — boiling weakens the set.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct substitute, pound for pound. A pound to a pint of gooseberry juice is a preserve-level ratio; it is meant to be sweet against very sour green fruit.
- Green gooseberriesThese are hard, sour, underripe berries picked in early summer, not the blushed dessert kind. If you can only find ripe ones, expect a sweeter, pinker cream and cut the sugar back by a third. Frozen gooseberries work; use them straight from frozen.
- SievingPush the pulp through a stainless or nylon sieve — old tinned or iron sieves gave fruit a metallic edge. Two pounds of fruit boiled in a pint and a half of water yields roughly a quart of thin juice once pressed.
- Setting and unmoulding"A cool place" meant a larder; use the refrigerator, and the overnight rest the recipe insists on is genuine — gelatine continues to firm for several hours after it appears set. To turn out, dip the mould to its rim in hot water for three or four seconds and invert onto a wetted plate so the shape can be slid into place.
- YieldTwo quarts is a substantial party mould, serving twelve to sixteen. Halve everything for a household quantity, or set it in individual glasses and skip the unmoulding.
Gooseberries were a British preoccupation in a way they have never quite been elsewhere: nineteenth-century gooseberry clubs in Lancashire and Cheshire competed to grow the heaviest single berry, and the fruit was cheap, hardy and everywhere in kitchen gardens. A "cream" in Victorian cookery books of this stamp usually means a moulded, set dessert — often, as here, not — and it belonged to the supper table or the cold buffet, where the ability to turn out a clean-shouldered shape from a fluted copper mould was a point of professional pride. The isinglass named in the ingredients was imported dried sturgeon bladder, long the standard setting agent and expensive enough that Cassell's prices the dish specifically "with best isinglass"; the alternative offered, gelatine, was the cheaper industrial product made from hides and bones, already competing with it in this period.