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Gooseberry Fool
Take the tops and stalks from a pound of green gooseberries, and boil them with three-quarters of a pound of sugar and a cupful of water. When quite soft, press them through a coarse sieve, and mix with them, very gradually, a pint of milk; or cream, if a richer dish is required. Serve when cold. This old-fashioned dish is wholesome and inexpensive, and, when well made, very agreeable. Time, about twenty minutes to boil the fruit. Probable cost, 9d. for this quantity, if made with milk. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A two-ingredient fruit fool of the plainest kind — no custard, no whipped cream, just sweetened gooseberry purée let down with milk. The whole thing hinges on how the dairy meets the acid.
- Cool the purée before adding milkCool the purerriesries are sharply acidic and warm milk stirred into them will curdle. Chill the sweetened pulp thoroughly, then beat the milk in a spoonful at a time. Cream, being fattier, is more forgiving; the recipe offers it simply as the richer alternative.
- Green gooseberriesThese are hard, sour, underripe fruit picked in late spring, not the sweet dessert gooseberries of high summer. If yours are ripe and soft, cut the sugar back sharply or the fool will be cloying.
- "A cupful of water"The cup here is not a standardised measure; treat it as roughly a half-pint (8-10 fl oz). The fruit gives up a good deal of juice on its own, so start with less and add only if the pan threatens to catch.
- A pintAn imperial pint, 20 fl oz, against a pound of fruit. That is a loose, pourable fool. For something that holds a spoon, use 10-12 fl oz and taste as you go.
- Sieving"Press them through a coarse sieve" removes skins and the hard seeds, which is worth doing — a food mill on its coarse plate does the same work in a fraction of the time. A blender will not, since it pulverises the seeds rather than holding them back.
- Twenty minutes to boilReasonable for hard green fruit, but check at ten. Once the berries burst and slump they are done; further boiling drives off the fresh flavour and leaves you with jam.
- Yield"Sufficient for six or seven persons" as the book says, which reflects Victorian portions. Four modern servings is more realistic. Serve very cold, with a thin crisp biscuit.
The fool is one of the oldest surviving English sweet dishes, recorded from the sixteenth century, and gooseberry is its classic form — the fruit grows readily in cool British gardens and ripens in the gap before the summer berries arrive. The name is generally traced to the sense of "fool" as something trifling or of no consequence, in the same spirit as "trifle" itself, though a derivation from the French fouler, to crush or press, is often repeated. Grander versions of the period fold the purée into whipped cream or a rich boiled custard; Cassell's, compiling for households of every income in the 1870s, gives the thrifty milk version and prices it at ninepence, noting only that it is "wholesome and inexpensive" — the two virtues the book most reliably praises.