Home › Cookery › Gooseberry Pie
Gooseberry Pie
Put one pound sugar to one of fruit, adding just enough water to prevent it from burning. Cook till it begins to jelly. Then spread over shapes of rich puff paste, already baked.--Mrs. M. C. C.
This is less a pie than a quick gooseberry preserve spooned into pre-baked pastry cases, so the two components are made separately and only meet at the end. The pastry must be fully baked and the fruit fully set before they are combined.
- Equal weightsOne pound of sugar to one pound of fruit is a true preserve ratio, not a pie filling. Green gooseberries are sharp enough to carry it, but the result is markedly sweeter than most modern fruit fillings.
- "Just enough water"For a pound of fruit, a quarter cup is ample; gooseberries release a good deal of juice as they heat. Start low and add only if the pan threatens to catch before the berries burst.
- Cook till it begins to jellyGooseberries are high in pectin and acid, so this happens readily. A hard boil of roughly a quarter of an hour is usually enough; around 220F on a thermometer is the full jelly point, and a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer should wrinkle when pushed. The original asks only that it begin to set, so stop short of a firm jam.
- Top and tailThe original assumes it. Snip off the stem and the dried blossom end of each berry before cooking, or strain the finished jelly if you would rather not.
- Rich puff pastePuff pastry, baked before it is filled. Bought all-butter puff cut into rounds or squares gives the "shapes" the recipe asks for. They must be cold and crisp before filling or the pastry will go sodden.
- Fruit availabilityFresh gooseberries have a short early-summer season and are scarce in much of the United States; frozen ones work and need no thawing, though allow slightly less added water.
- Yield and timingA pound of fruit with its pound of sugar makes a generous quantity of filling, enough for a good many small pastry shapes. Assemble shortly before serving; the filling keeps refrigerated for a long time, so it can be made well ahead.
Gooseberries were a fixture of American kitchen gardens in the nineteenth century, valued precisely because they came ripe in early summer before other fruit and held enough natural pectin to set without help. Their decline in the United States is documented: federal and state eradication campaigns in the early twentieth century targeted Ribes species as an alternate host of white pine blister rust, and bans lingered in some states for decades, which is a large part of why a fruit common enough for Mrs. M. C. C.'s pie in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) is now hard to find at market. The method here, cooking fruit to a jelly and spreading it on separately baked puff paste, neatly sidesteps the problem of a wet filling soaking an under-baked crust.