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Gooseberry Sauce for Lamb
Scald a half-pint of berries and stir into a pint of drawn butter. Serve hot.
Two sentences that assume you already know what drawn butter is. Everything hinges on that assumption, so start there.
- Drawn butter is a sauce, not melted butterIn American books of this period drawn butter means a simple butter sauce: roughly 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 2 tablespoons flour, whisked into a pint (2 cups) of hot water or light stock, then finished with another 2-4 tablespoons butter off the heat. Modern "drawn butter" meaning clarified butter will not work here; the gooseberries would sit in a pool of oil.
- Half a pint of berriesA half-pint measures about 1 cup, or 5 to 6 ounces of gooseberries, which is a modest amount against a full pint of sauce. Scale the berries up to 8 ounces if you want the fruit to read clearly.
- ScaldHere it means to soften the berries in a little water or in the sauce base until the skins split, two to four minutes, not to boil them to a pulp. Green gooseberries collapse quickly once the skins go.
- Use underripe fruitThe point of this sauce is sharpness against fatty meat, so hard green gooseberries are correct. Ripe dessert varieties turn it sweet and dull; if that is all you can get, add lemon juice.
- Do not let it boil after the berries go inA flour-thickened butter sauce holds well, but hard boiling with acidic fruit will thin it and can break the finishing butter. Keep it just below a simmer and serve immediately.
- Seasoning is left to youThe original gives none. Salt is essential, a pinch of sugar takes the edge off very sour fruit without sweetening the sauce, and a scrape of nutmeg or a little chopped mint is period-appropriate.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 cups, enough for six to eight servings of roast or grilled lamb. It thickens noticeably as it cools, so hold it warm rather than reheating.
Gooseberry sauce is an English inheritance, and in England it belongs first to mackerel -- the standard pairing in cookery books from the eighteenth century onward, where the fruit's acidity cuts an oily fish. Sending it out with lamb follows the same logic that produces mint sauce: a sharp, barely sweet condiment against rich young meat. The drawn butter base suggests an American adaptation, since drawn butter was the household workhorse sauce of nineteenth-century United States kitchens, poured over fish, vegetables and boiled meats alike, and it gave a cook a way to stretch a cup of fruit into a full sauceboat. Gooseberries and currants host white pine blister rust, and cultivation was widely restricted in the United States in the early twentieth century, which is a large part of why the berry is familiar to English cooks and something of a curiosity to American ones.