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Gooseberry Custard
Boil a quart of gooseberries in half a pint of water. Add a piece of butter the size of a walnut. Boil the gooseberries quickly, and, when soft, pulp them through a sieve. Add three-quarters of a pound of sugar and the yolks of four eggs. Stir over the fire until thick, but the berries must not boil. Serve in a glass dish, or in custard-glasses. Time, boil till soft--about fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for seven or eight glasses.
A fruit-thickened egg custard, essentially a gooseberry curd served cold in glasses. The whole recipe hinges on one line: the eggs must thicken without boiling.
- The hinge: no boilOnce the yolks go in, keep the pan below a simmer — around 170-180F. Above that the yolks curdle and the custard turns grainy; a heatproof bowl over barely simmering water gives you far more control than direct heat.
- A quart of gooseberriesThis is a dry volume measure, roughly 1 1/4 lb of fruit. Green, hard, underripe gooseberries are what is wanted here — they carry the acidity the sugar is balancing.
- Butter the size of a walnutAbout 1 oz, or two tablespoons. It is there for gloss and body, not flavour.
- Three-quarters of a pound of sugarThat is about 1 3/4 cups for 1 1/4 lb of fruit, which reads as extremely sweet now. Add half, taste the hot pur ew sharp gooseberries will genuinely take most of it.
- Pulping through a sievePress the cooked fruit through a fine sieve rather than blending it — gooseberry skins and seeds do not break down, and a food processor only chops them smaller. Expect to leave a fair amount of debris behind.
- Cooling and settingThe custard thickens further as it cools. Pour it warm into the glasses, cover the surface to stop a skin forming, and chill for several hours before serving.
- Yield and costSeven or eight custard glasses, which are small — 3 to 4 fl oz each. The 1s. is Victorian currency and has no useful modern equivalent.
- If gooseberries are unavailableFrozen green gooseberries are the closest substitute, though they may give up rather more liquid than fresh. Nothing else is quite the same, though a mixture of tart green rhubarb and a little lemon juice gives a similar acid backbone.
Gooseberries were a British garden staple long before they were a market fruit — cheap, prolific, unfussy about soil, and ripening in the gap between spring rhubarb and high summer's stone fruit. Nineteenth-century cookery books are consequently thick with them: fools, tarts, jams, vinegars, sauces for mackerel, and custards like this one. The recipe sits in a family with the older English fruit curds, in which acidic fruit pulp, sugar, butter and egg yolks are cooked gently together until they thicken; lemon curd is the survivor, though versions made with other tart fruit were also known. It is worth noting that gooseberries never established themselves in the United States on anything like the same scale, partly because in the early twentieth century their cultivation was restricted in many states, the plants being a host in the life cycle of white pine blister rust.