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GOOSEBERRY SOUFFLE (a pretty supper dish)
Pick the gooseberries, and boil them with a liberal allowance of sugar until tender. Press them through a coarse sieve, and put the pulp into a glass dish. Let it grow cold, then pour over it a good custard. This may be made with the yolks of eggs, and the whites may be beaten till firm and cooked as described under the heading, EGGS AS SNOW. The appearance is improved by colouring half the white of egg with a few drops of cochineal. Time, about three-quarters of an hour to boil a quart of gooseberries till they are tender. Sufficient, a quart of gooseberries and a pint and a half of custard for six or eight persons. Probable cost, 1s. 4d.
A cold assembly rather than a baked soufflé: stewed gooseberry pulp, custard poured over, and poached meringue heaped on top. The only real cooking is the fruit and the custard, and the custard is where it can go wrong.
- Not a souffléNothing is baked and nothing rises. Victorian usage of the word was looser than ours and could cover dishes finished with a froth of whisked white, so expect a trifle-like glass dish, not a risen one.
- Imperial measuresA quart here is the imperial quart, 40 fl oz, so somewhere around 1 3/4 to 2 lb of gooseberries. The pint and a half of custard is 30 imperial fl oz, close to 4 US cups.
- Cut the boiling timeThree-quarters of an hour suggests hard, underripe green cooking gooseberries. Fruit from a modern market will often soften and burst in 15 to 20 minutes over gentle heat, and longer does the flavour no favours.
- Sugar"A liberal allowance" is doing heavy lifting. Cooking gooseberries are genuinely sour: start at 8 oz sugar per 2 lb fruit and taste, remembering the custard adds sweetness of its own.
- The custard is the hingeA yolk custard curdles above about 180F. Cook it in a bowl over simmering water, stir constantly, and pull it the moment it coats the back of a spoon. It must also be completely cold before it goes over the fruit, or the layers muddle.
- Eggs as snowThe cross-reference points to a separate entry, which will carry the method; the usual Victorian sense is whites whisked stiff and poached in spoonfuls in barely simmering milk, then lifted out to drain — what is now sold as oeufs a la neige. Poach a minute or so per side; they toughen if the milk boils.
- CochinealAvailable as carmine food colouring, though it is an insect-derived dye and not vegetarian. Any pink colouring gives the same effect; use it sparingly, as the intended look is a blush, not raspberry.
- Yield and servingSix to eight, as stated, in a single glass bowl. Assemble the fruit and custard several hours ahead but add the poached whites shortly before serving, since they weep as they stand.
Gooseberries were a British kitchen-garden staple through the nineteenth century, grown so widely that competitive gooseberry clubs in the north of England weighed prize berries against each other, and the fruit turns up in Victorian cookery books far more often than it does today. Its high pectin and sharp acidity made it useful cooked, and the standard treatments — fool, tart, sauce for mackerel — all pair it with something rich and bland to blunt the sourness, which is exactly what the custard does here. The dish is billed as a supper dish because it is cold, made ahead and looks well on a table: the tinted snow on top is a piece of late-Victorian presentation, from a period when a dish was expected to be decorative as well as edible. Cochineal, imported from scale insects raised on cactus in Mexico and the Canaries, was the ordinary pink of the Victorian kitchen before coal-tar dyes displaced it.