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Gruetz (from Holland)
1 pint gooseberry pulp, 1 pint red-currant juice, 1 cupful orange juice; when hot stir in as much corn meal as will thicken; add pinch salt; cook; pour into fancy mould; serve with sweetened whipped cream, filled through pastry tube, and sugar.
A molded fruit pudding set with cornmeal rather than gelatin or cornstarch. The recipe gives no thickener quantity and no timings, so the two things worth knowing are how much meal to use and how long to cook it.
- The hinge: cook the meal outCornmeal needs 15 to 20 minutes of gentle simmering, stirred often, or the set pudding tastes raw and gritty. Undercooked meal is the usual failure with this style of dish, not a weak set.
- How much cornmealThe original says only "as much as will thicken." For the roughly 2 1/2 pints of liquid here, expect to need on the order of 3/4 to 1 cup of fine yellow cornmeal, rained in slowly while whisking, for a pudding firm enough to unmold; less will give a softer set. Add it gradually; the mixture keeps thickening as it cooks and again as it cools.
- Gooseberry pulpThis means gooseberries stewed soft with a little water and pushed through a sieve to remove skins and seeds. Roughly 1 1/2 lb of fresh or frozen berries yields a pint of pulp.
- Red-currant juiceFresh currants are seasonal and scarce; a pint is about 2 lb of fruit, crushed, warmed and strained. Unsweetened bottled currant juice works, in which case taste before adding sugar of your own.
- SugarNo sugar is listed in the body of the recipe, only the sweetened cream and the sprinkling at the end. Gooseberries and currants are both sharply acid, so many cooks will want 3/4 to 1 cup of sugar stirred into the hot fruit before the meal goes in.
- UnmoldingRinse the mold with cold water and leave it wet before filling; do not oil it, which clouds the surface. Chill at least four hours, then dip the mold briefly in hot water to release.
- "Filled through pastry tube"Simply piped whipped cream, a mark of a dressed-up dessert. A plain jug of cold unwhipped cream is the traditional Northern European accompaniment and suits the acidity better.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts of pudding, serving six to eight.
Grütze is the German word for groats, the coarse cracked grain that thickens the dish, and the family of red fruit puddings it names — rote Grütze in northern Germany, rødgrød in Denmark, and cognate names in the Dutch and Frisian north — runs along the whole North Sea coast wherever currants, gooseberries and raspberries grow well. Traditional thickeners include semolina, sago or cracked barley; the cornmeal here looks like an American substitution, cornmeal being the cheap everyday grain in a United States kitchen where semolina was not. Compilations like this one often collected dishes under national labels — "from Holland," "Spanish," "German" — as a selling point for cooks who wanted variety, and such recipes were frequently reworked with domestic ingredients along the way. This is a molded pudding rather than a pastry, and would most likely have been served cold as a summer sweet when the fruit was in.