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Gooseberry Tart
Pick off the tops and stalks of the gooseberries. Put them into a pie-dish, pile them high in the centre, strew a little sugar over them, and add a table-spoonful of water. Line the edge of the dish with a good crust, put on the cover, and bake in a brisk oven. Strew a little powdered sugar over before sending the tart to table. A little cream or custard is a great improvement to this dish. An ample allowance of sugar is required for gooseberries, especially when they are only partially ripe. Two pints and a half of gooseberries will make a pie for four or five persons. Probable cost, 9d. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour.
An English gooseberry pie of the older kind: no bottom crust, just a pastry lid over fruit heaped in a deep dish. A few conventions need translating.
- "Line the edge of the dish"This is not a lined tart shell. You cut a strip of pastry to sit on the wetted rim of the pie-dish, then lay the lid on top and seal to that strip. It gives the crust something to grip so it does not slide into the fruit as the gooseberries collapse.
- Pile the fruit highThe mound in the centre is structural — it holds the lid clear of the juice. A pie funnel or an upturned eggcup does the same job. Without it the underside of the pastry steams and goes grey.
- "A brisk oven"Roughly 400-425F. At that heat the recipe's stated three-quarters of an hour will brown the pastry hard; one way round it is 20 minutes hot to set and colour the crust, then down to about 375F for the remainder.
- QuantitiesTwo and a half pints of gooseberries is a volume measure, roughly 1 3/4 to 2 lb, about 800-900 g. The sugar is left to the cook: for green, hard berries reckon on 3/4 to 1 cup, less for ripe ones, which are noticeably sweeter.
- Only one spoonful of waterGooseberries are very juicy and give up a great deal of liquid under heat. More water than this and the filling floods. If your fruit is fully ripe you can leave the water out.
- Topping and dredgingThe powdered sugar strewn on before serving is nearest to what we would call caster sugar; a light brush of water on the hot lid helps it cling.
- Yield and costFour to five servings, as stated. The 9d is the compiler's marketing estimate for a Victorian household and belongs to the book's price-per-dish habit, not to any modern shop.
Gooseberries were a British obsession in the nineteenth century in a way they have never quite been elsewhere. Northern industrial towns supported gooseberry clubs whose members competed on the weight of single berries, and nurserymen listed hundreds of named varieties; the fruit grew easily in small gardens and cropped early, ahead of most other soft fruit. The recipe's remark that unripe berries need an ample allowance of sugar reflects normal practice -- cooking gooseberries were picked hard and green, often as a thinning of the crop, and the sourness was accepted rather than treated as a fault. Cassell's, an encyclopaedic household dictionary aimed at middle-class kitchens, gives the dish in the plainest possible form and, as throughout the book, appends a probable cost so a housekeeper could budget the week. The suggestion of cream or custard alongside is a standard English finish for a hot fruit pie and was still being repeated in cookery books a century later.