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Gooseberry Pie
3 cupfuls gooseberries, stewed with 1 1/2 cupfuls sugar fifteen minutes, and strained. Line pie-plate with paste; put in gooseberry jam; wash the edges, lay 3 narrow bars across; fasten at edge, then 3 more across, forming diamond-shaped spaces. Lay rim of paste; wash with egg-wash; bake in quick oven until paste is cooked.
A single-crust lattice pie with a pre-cooked filling, so the only thing the oven has to do is cook the pastry. The success of it rests entirely on how thick the gooseberry pulp is when it goes into the shell.
- Cook the filling down properlyThere is no flour, cornstarch or egg in the filling, so its body comes only from evaporation and the natural pectin in underripe gooseberries. Fifteen minutes of hard stewing should leave a pulp thick enough to mound on a spoon; if it still runs, keep reducing before straining, or it will soak the base and weep out through the lattice.
- "Quick oven"Roughly 400-425F. At that heat the pastry should set and colour in something like 25-35 minutes. Since the filling is already cooked, bake to the pastry, not the fruit.
- Which gooseberriesThe recipe most likely has hard, green, sharply acid gooseberries in mind, which would explain why 1 1/2 cupfuls of sugar to 3 of fruit is not excessive. With riper, sweeter red or dessert varieties, reduce the sugar or the pie may be cloying and slack.
- StrainingPushing the stewed fruit through a sieve removes skins, stem ends and the fine seeds, giving the smooth "jam" the instruction calls for. If you would rather keep the texture, top and tail the berries first and skip the sieve, but expect a looser filling.
- "Wash the edges"Here this means brushing the pastry rim with water or beaten egg so the lattice strips and the top rim adhere. The later "egg-wash" over the whole top is what gives the gloss.
- Building the latticeThree strips one way and three the other, laid on the diagonal, gives the diamond spaces described. Chill the strips before laying them; warm pastry stretches and the diamonds go crooked.
- "Lay rim of paste"A separate band of pastry pressed round the edge over the strip ends, sealing them and hiding the joins. Trim it flush and crimp.
- YieldEnough for one 8- or 9-inch pie, six modest slices. Serve barely warm or at room temperature; hot from the oven the filling has not set.
Gooseberries were a staple of British and North American kitchen gardens well into the twentieth century, prized precisely because they ripen early and are usable while still hard and green, when the acid and pectin are at their peak. That made them one of the earliest pie fruits of the season, and books of this period give gooseberry tarts, pies, fools and jams in quantity. The technique here, cooking the fruit to a jam and then baking only the pastry over it, is the older tart method, and the open diamond lattice is one nineteenth-century way of showing off a coloured preserve beneath. American gooseberry growing was curtailed from the early twentieth century, when white pine blister rust, which uses currants and gooseberries as an alternate host, led to restrictions on planting Ribes in a number of states; the fruit is common again in Britain and northern Europe but still uncommon in most American markets.