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Rhubarb Fool
Wash and, if necessary, peel the rhubarb, and cut it up into small pieces. Put sufficient for use into a jar which has a closely-fitting lid, with as much sugar as will be required to sweeten it. Set this jar in a saucepan of boiling water, and keep it boiling until the fruit is quite soft. Rub it through a sieve with the back of a wooden spoon, and mix with the pulp as much cream, milk, or thin cold custard as will make it of the consistency of gruel. Taste it, and if not sufficiently sweet, add a little more sugar. Serve cold in a glass dish. Probable cost, 5d. or 6d. per pint if made with milk. Time for boiling, varying with the age of the fruit.
A dry-heat method: the rhubarb cooks in its own juice inside a sealed jar standing in boiling water, which is why no liquid is added. Keep that principle and the rest follows.
- The hinge: no added waterThe lidded jar in a pan of boiling water is a bain-marie. Rhubarb throws off a great deal of liquid on its own, and added water will thin the pur hicken. A heatproof jar or bowl covered with foil, standing in an inch or two of simmering water, will usually take something like 20 to 30 minutes, though the recipe itself notes that the time varies with the age of the fruit.
- Sugar quantityThe recipe leaves it to taste. For untrimmed forced rhubarb reckon 3 to 4 oz sugar per pound of stalks; for coarse late-summer rhubarb, 5 to 6 oz. Sugaring before cooking draws juice out and helps the fruit collapse.
- Peeling"If necessary" means only the tough, stringy outer skin of thick maincrop stalks. Early pink forced rhubarb needs nothing but washing and trimming.
- LeavesTrim and discard all leaf, including the fleshy base where the blade meets the stalk. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not food.
- SievingThe wooden spoon and sieve are not fussiness. Rhubarb is full of long fibres that a blender chops but does not remove, leaving a purée that feels hairy on the tongue. Push it through a sieve and discard what stays behind.
- "The consistency of gruel"That means pourable, roughly like thin pouring custard rather than a set mousse. For a thicker modern fool, fold in lightly whipped double cream instead and stop stirring while it is still marbled.
- Cream, milk or custardDouble or whipping cream gives the richest result; whole milk gives the 5d. or 6d. a pint version quoted here, and is best eaten soon after mixing, as the fruit acid can curdle it if left standing. Cold thin custard is the most forgiving choice.
- Yield and servingA pound of rhubarb with about half a pint of cream or custard fills four glasses. Chill well before serving, and taste for sugar again once it is cold.
Fools are among the oldest surviving English sweets, recorded from the sixteenth century as crushed or cooked fruit slackened with cream or custard; the name is generally traced to the sense of a trifling, inconsequential thing, in the same spirit as "trifle" and "whim-wham", rather than to any particular cook. Rhubarb, however, is a late arrival to the group. It was grown in Britain for centuries as a medicinal root, and only became a dessert fruit once cheap refined sugar made its ferocious acidity palatable, which is why rhubarb tarts, fools and jams crowd into nineteenth-century cookbooks and are largely absent from earlier ones. The method here is a template: the sealed jar in boiling water stews an acid fruit without scorching it or thinning it with water, and the same instructions serve for gooseberries, damsons or apples. The costing in pence per pint is a reminder of the book's readership, a household where the difference between finishing a fool with milk and finishing it with cream was a matter worth putting in print.