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Strawberry Fool
Take a quart of picked strawberries, ripe and finely flavoured; put them into a saucepan with a quarter of a pound of white sugar; cover closely, and stew them gently for ten minutes, stirring the fruit now and again to keep it from burning. Rub it through a fine hair sieve with a wooden spoon, and when the pulp is cold stir into it as much new milk as will make it of the consistency of custard. Serve quite cold. If cream is not to be had, and a rich dish is required, the yolks of two eggs may be stirred over the fire till it is on the point of boiling. Time, ten minutes to boil the fruit. Sufficient for six or seven persons. Probable cost, 1s., made with milk only.
A very plain fruit fool of the older type, thickened with nothing but sieved fruit and milk. A few of its measures and materials need translating.
- A quart of strawberriesFruit here is measured by volume, not weight. A quart of hulled strawberries is roughly 1 1/4 lb (550-600 g), depending on how the measure was heaped.
- New milkThis means fresh, unskimmed milk straight from the dairy — whole milk is the modern equivalent. Note that the recipe treats milk as the economy option (the costing is given 'made with milk only') and cream as the richer alternative.
- The hair sieveA fine-mesh nylon or stainless sieve does the same job. Push the hot pulp through with a wooden spoon or a stiff silicone spatula; the point is to leave the seeds behind, so a food mill with a fine plate also works. A blender does not, since it pulverises the pips.
- Cool the pulp completely firstThis is the hinge of the whole thing. Stirring milk into warm acidic strawberry purée will curdle it. The instruction to wait until the pulp is cold is not fussiness.
- The egg-yolk versionThe sentence is compressed to the point of confusion: the intention appears to be to warm the milk with two beaten yolks, stirring constantly until it thickens, then cool it fully before combining with the fruit. Take it off the heat before it actually boils, or it scrambles.
- Stewing the fruitTen minutes covered over low heat is right for driving off rawness while keeping the colour. Very ripe berries may collapse sooner; take them off when they have gone slack and given up their juice.
- SugarA quarter pound (4 oz, about 115 g) to a quart of berries. Taste the cooled pulp and adjust before adding the milk.
- Yield and servingSix or seven persons, as stated. Serve quite cold; the mixture is pourable rather than spoon-standing, and was meant to be.
The fool is one of the oldest surviving English fruit puddings, recorded from the sixteenth century onward and originally made with gooseberries. The name is generally traced to the ordinary English word for something trifling ut a trifle or a whim-wham — rather than to the French fouler, to crush, which is a later and less well-supported explanation. What makes this Cassell's version characteristic of its period is the frank costing at the foot: one shilling, made with milk only. The egg-yolk variation is the middle path — a way of buying back some richness from the larder rather than the dairy."