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Trifle, Gooseberry
Wash a pint of green gooseberries, and stew them gently with a little water until they break; press them through a sieve, throw away the skins, and sweeten the pulp agreeably. Make a thin custard, as recommended for apple trifle, and when it begins to thicken, pour it out and let it cool. Mix it with the fruit pulp, lay it on the trifle-dish, and pile whipped cream on the top, as for other trifles. Time, about half an hour to simmer the gooseberries. Probable cost, 3s. 6d., if made with cream. Sufficient for a trifle-dish.
A fruit-fool trifle rather than the sponge-and-sherry kind: nothing here is soaked in wine, and the whole thing is pulp, custard and cream. Two points decide whether it works — the custard must not boil, and the pulp must be sweetened harder than instinct suggests.
- The custard is the hingeA "thin custard" is a stirred pouring custard of egg yolks, sugar and milk, cooked over gentle heat until it coats the back of a spoon at around 175-180F. Let it reach a boil and the yolks scramble; the book's instruction to pour it out the moment it begins to thicken will at least stop carry-over cooking in a hot pan.
- A pint of gooseberriesMeasured by volume, not weight — roughly 12 oz to 1 lb (350-450 g) of fruit, which should reduce to something in the region of a cup of sieved pulp. Topping and tailing before stewing is worth doing, though the recipe mentions only washing.
- Green means unripeThese are hard, sour, early-summer gooseberries, not the sweeter dessert varieties. "Sweeten agreeably" will mean something like 4-6 oz of sugar to the pound of fruit, added after cooking so you can taste as you go.
- Half an hour is generousGreen gooseberries will usually burst in 10-15 minutes with a few tablespoons of water over low heat; stop as soon as the skins split and the flesh collapses.
- Get both parts coldMixing warm custard into warm pulp gives a slack, weeping trifle. Cool both, fold together, then chill the assembled base before the cream goes on.
- Whipped cream on topSoft peaks only, unsweetened or barely sweetened, since the fruit layer is already sugared. Pile it on shortly before serving so it does not sink.
- Yield and dishThe book says only "sufficient for a trifle-dish" and gives neither a capacity nor a number of servings. The probable cost of 3s. 6d. is a Victorian retail estimate, and the qualifier "if made with cream" indicates the cream was the expensive part.
Cassell's places this among a run of fruit trifles built on the same pattern — apple, gooseberry, and so on — in which the older trifle of soaked sponge, ratafias and wine gives way, in this recipe at least, to what is essentially a fool under a cap of cream. Green gooseberries were the first substantial fruit of the English kitchen garden, ready in May and June before soft fruit proper arrived, and they were bred obsessively in the industrial north, where gooseberry clubs held weigh-ins for the heaviest berry through the nineteenth century. Their high pectin and sharp acidity made them a standby for fools, tarts and sauces for oily fish; here the acid does useful work, cutting a custard and a cream that would otherwise be cloying.