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Gooseberry Pudding, Baked
Pick the heads and stalks off the gooseberries, and put the berries into a jar. Place this jar in a saucepan of water, and let it boil until the fruit is soft enough to pulp. Press it through a sieve, and to every pint of pulp add an ounce and a half of fresh butter, four ounces of finely-grated bread-crumbs, a quarter of a pound of sugar, and three well-beaten eggs. The latter should not be added until the pudding is cool. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish, and bake in a moderate oven. Strew sifted sugar over the pudding before serving. It may be eaten either hot or cold. If a richer pudding is required, Savoy biscuits (see SAVOY BISCUITS) may be substituted for the bread-crumbs, and the edge of the dish may be lined with puff paste. Time, about half an hour to bake. Probable cost, 10d., if made with bread. Sufficient for five persons.
A fruit-pulp pudding of the plainest English kind: cooked gooseberry, breadcrumb, butter, sugar and egg, baked until just set. The whole thing turns on the temperature of the pulp when the eggs go in.
- Cool the pulp firstThe instruction to wait until the mixture is cool is the hinge of the recipe. Beaten eggs dropped into hot gooseberry pulp will scramble into threads and the pudding will bake grainy rather than smooth. Let it come to no more than lukewarm.
- The jar in a saucepanThis is a bain-marie, used because gooseberries scorch and catch easily over direct heat and because it softens the fruit without adding water to it. A covered heatproof bowl set over simmering water does the same job in 20-30 minutes; a heavy pan over low heat with a splash of water works if you stir it.
- Which gooseberriesThese are hard green cooking gooseberries, picked underripe and sharply acid, not the sweet dessert varieties. Frozen green gooseberries behave the same way. If you can only get ripe red or golden fruit, the pudding will be duller and will need less sugar.
- A pint of pulpAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, about 2.4 US cups of sieved pulp. Expect to start with something in the region of 1.5-2 lb of trimmed fruit, since sieving discards some skin and seed.
- Moderate oven'Moderate' is usually taken as about 350F/180C. Half an hour suits a shallow dish; a deeper one will want 40-45 minutes. It is done when the centre is set with only a slight tremble.
- BreadcrumbsFresh crumbs from a day-old white loaf, grated or blitzed, not dry packaged crumb. Dried crumbs absorb far more liquid and will give a stodgy, pasty pudding.
- Savoy biscuitsSponge fingers, sold now as ladyfingers or savoiardi. Crushed and used in place of the crumbs they add sugar and egg to the mix, so cut the quarter pound of sugar back by an ounce or so if you take that route.
- Sugar to tasteA quarter pound of sugar to a pint of green gooseberry pulp is restrained by modern palates. Taste the sweetened pulp before the eggs go in and adjust; it should be pleasantly tart, not mouth-puckering.
- YieldFive servings, as stated. The 'probable cost, 10d.' is a Victorian household figure and belongs to the book, not to your shopping.
Gooseberries were one of the great fruits of the British kitchen garden, cheap, prolific and reliably available in early summer before other soft fruit came in, and the nineteenth century saw a genuine craze for them among northern English cottage growers who competed at gooseberry shows for the heaviest single berry. A pudding like this one belongs to the frugal end of that tradition: breadcrumbs stand in for flour or pastry, the fruit supplies both flavour and moisture, and the eggs do the binding. Cassell's offers the Savoy-biscuit-and-puff-paste version as the step up for a table that could afford it, though the costing given covers only the bread version. The technique of setting a jar of fruit in a pan of boiling water long predates the recipe and would have been a natural convenience for anything acid or liable to catch, in the days before heavy-based pans and controllable heat.