Home › Creams, Jellies and Cold Sweets › Strawberry Fool
Strawberry Fool
Ingredients.
One pound of Strawberries.
Half a pint of Custard.
Two tablespoonfuls of Cream.
Three ounces of Castor Sugar.
A few drops of Carmine.
A few drops of Lemon-juice.
Make half a pint of custard from three yolks and one white and half a pint of milk. When the custard is quite cold mix it with the strawberries, which have been rubbed through a hairsieve (use a wooden spoon). Add the cream, colouring, sugar, and a few drops of lemon-juice.
Serve as cold as possible. Do not cook the fruit.
The custard should be well cooked, so that it is nice and thick.
A raw-fruit fool thickened with a proper egg custard rather than whipped cream, so the whole thing turns on the custard being cooked thick and then chilled hard before the purée goes in.
- Imperial half pintThis is a British book, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ cups, not 8 oz. Use 1¼ cups milk with the three yolks and one white.
- Custard consistencyCook the custard over gentle heat, stirring, until it coats the back of a spoon, generally somewhere around 175–180F. Push it much past the mid-180s and it is liable to curdle, and because there is a white in the mix as well as the yolks it will set at a slightly lower temperature than an all-yolk custard.
- Chill before combiningThe instruction that matters most: the custard must be quite cold. Warm custard slackens the fruit purée and the fool will not hold its body, since there is no gelatine and only two tablespoons of cream.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar. Granulated will work but dissolves slowly in a cold mixture and can leave a gritty edge; pulse it briefly in a grinder if that is all you have.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve; one reason often given for preferring hair to metal is that metal discoloured acidic fruit. A nylon or stainless mesh sieve is fine now. Press the berries through with a wooden spoon or plastic scraper to leave the seeds behind; a blender gives a paler, foamier purée.
- CarmineCochineal-based red colouring, still sold as carmine or E120. Presumably to reinforce the pink, since the yellow custard dulls the colour of the raw purée. A drop or two of any red food colouring does the same job, or leave it out.
- Do not cook the fruitStated in the original and worth keeping. Raw purée is what distinguishes this from a stewed-fruit fool; heat flattens strawberry aroma quickly.
- Yield and servingRoughly 1¼ pints of finished fool, enough for four to six glasses. The recipe asks only that it be served as cold as possible; serve in glasses, with a thin biscuit if you like.
"Fool" as the name of a dish of fruit and cream appears in English cookery from the sixteenth century, and the name is generally taken to come from "fool" in the sense of something trifling (compare trifle), dictionaries specifically doubting any derivation from the French fouler, to crush or press. Early fools were often thick baked or boiled custards flavoured with fruit. The insistence on carmine is characteristic of high-class cookery of the period, where the appearance of a dish on a dressed table mattered as much as its flavour.