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Simple Gooseberry Pie
To gooseberries stewed in a little water add sugar to taste, then crush fruit somewhat; add dessertspoon each of flour and butter (mixed). Place all in pan or dish with paste-lined sides and cover with crust, pricked or slashed, and bake.
GOOSEBERRY TART No. I Stew berries like cranberries, using two-thirds as much sugar as fruit. Line tin or dish with pastry and bake it till light brown before placing gooseberries in it. Finish with diagonal lattice of pastry; replace in oven and bake till done.
GOOSEBERRY TART No. 2 Place sugar on ripe, uncooked berries, letting stand till clear, when mash through coarse sieve and fill pastry shells (already half-baked). Replace in oven till heated through, when place meringue on top and lightly brown. Whipped cream may be substituted for meringue or canned berries for the fresh. Also the very small tart shells may be used. GOOSEBERRY TART No. 3 Line sides of dish with short crust. Pile ripe, uncooked berries in centre with one-fourth pint sugar and place crust on top. Prick well. Bake three-quarters of an hour; sprinkle fine sugar and nutmeg on top and serve with a jug of cream and dish of custards.
GOOSEBERRY PUDDING (Boiled) Top and tail a quart of full-grown but green berries; scald and let stand till cold, after which drain them. Chop six ounces of beef suet and rub well through a pound of flour, adding a half-teaspoon of salt and a half-pint of ice water-just enough to keep the dough together. Roll out in circular form and place gooseberries in the middle, meantime having added to them a half-pound of sugar. (More added before boiling would toughen them.) Draw up the dough as for dumplings and place in a wet, dredged pudding cloth; tie, leaving room for swelling, and place in a pot of fast boiling water, with plate at bottom to prevent scorching. Boil three hours, turning once in a while and filling up with boiling water as needed. Serve with sugar.
GOOSEBERRY FOOL No. I Top and tail a quart of ripe berries and simmer in a pint of water. When the fruit turns colour, is soft and swelled drain and put it through a colander. Add one-half pound sugar and let cool. Heat a quart of milk and stir into it carefully the beaten yolks of two eggs. Let thicken and flavour with nutmeg then remove and mix carefully with the cold fruit.
GOOSEBERRY FOOL No. 2 Prepare very young gooseberries as above and when cool add to them gradually a quart of cream, whipping well.
Serve cold.
Six gooseberry desserts in one entry, all assuming an English cook with hard green berries in early summer and a coal range. The measurements are period British-American hybrids; the temperatures are absent entirely.
- Green versus ripe berriesThe recipes distinguish carefully between "full-grown but green" fruit and "ripe" fruit, and it matters. Green gooseberries are firm and sharply acid and hold their shape; ripe ones are softer and sweeter, and break down readily, which is what Tart No. 2 and the fools rely on.
- Oven heatNo temperatures are given. Bake the double-crust pie and the No. 3 tart at 400-425F; blind-bake shells at 400F; brown meringue at 350F until just coloured, a few minutes.
- Odd measuresA dessertspoon is 2 teaspoons, so the pie thickener is about 2 teaspoons each flour and butter rubbed together. "One-fourth pint sugar" is a half cup by volume, roughly 3.5 oz. A quart of topped berries weighs about 1.25 lb.
- Top and tailThis means pinching off the stem and the dried blossom end of each berry. It is tedious and unavoidable; the blossom ends are papery and unpleasant in a purée. Scissors are faster than a knife.
- Sugar timing in the boiled puddingThe parenthetical warning is the hinge of that recipe. Sugar added to raw gooseberries before a long boil draws water out and firms the skins, so they stay tough through three hours of steam. Add only the half pound specified, with the fruit already in the crust.
- The boiled pudding, practicallyA floured cloth tied loosely in a pot with a plate underneath still works, but a buttered 1.5-quart pudding basin with a pleated foil and parchment lid, set on a trivet in simmering water, is far easier to manage over three hours. Keep the water topped up with boiling water so it never drops below halfway up the basin.
- Fool No. 1 is a custardA quart of milk to two yolks is a very thin custard by modern standards and will not thicken much. Cook it to 175-180F over low heat, stirring, and do not let it approach a boil or the yolks will curdle into threads. Chill both fruit and custard fully before combining or the mixture separates.
- Fool No. 2A quart of cream whipped into the purée from a quart of berries gives an enormous amount, eight to ten servings. Whip the cream to soft peaks separately and fold the cold pur he with, which deflates.
- Canned and frozen fruitThe recipe offers canned gooseberries as a substitute; these are now hard to find in North America. Frozen gooseberries work for the stewed and puréed versions, though they release more liquid, so stew them uncovered to drive it off before adding thickener.
- YieldEach tart or pie serves six to eight; the boiled pudding, built on a pound of flour, serves eight generously.
Gooseberries were a staple of English kitchen gardens for centuries, prized precisely because they ripen in late spring and early summer, ahead of nearly every other fruit, and because unripe fruit is high in pectin and acid and cooks well. The fool, which appears here twice, is one of the oldest surviving English dessert forms; the name is generally traced to a sense of "fool" meaning a trifling thing, though a derivation from the French fouler, to crush, is often repeated and has never been firmly established. Gooseberry fool with cream, and gooseberry pudding boiled in a cloth with suet crust, both belong to the English tradition the compiler was drawing on. The cluster also captures a moment just before gooseberries largely disappeared from American cooking: because Ribes species host white pine blister rust, cultivation was restricted or banned in many states in the early twentieth century, and the fruit never recovered its place in the household repertoire even after most of those restrictions lapsed.