Goose
To be stuffed with sage and onions, or with chestnuts. (See Forcemeats Nos. 6 and 7.) To be served with apple sauce or gooseberry sauce. A green goose is rarely stuffed, but his inside is pretty well seasoned with pepper and salt. Sauerkraut is considered a good garnish. GOOSEBERRY Comes under the name of Currant or Curran, but may here obtain a word or two for itself. It is known in some of the English shires under the name of Carberry, because it is red, or was known chiefly as red; of Feaberry, because it was deemed good for fevers; and of Wineberry, because of the wine it made: why it has been called Gooseberry is not so clear. The older herbalists always insisted that it was so called because it was used as a sauce for goose ; and the analogy of wineberry and feaberry would seem to bear them out. If this should not be satisfactory, we have to fall back upon the old English gorst, in modern English gorse, in Shakespeare, goss; an etymology which will at the same time account for the Scottish name of the berry, which varies between groset and grosart. The Scotch, it must be remembered, Gooseberry are great in gooseberries. It is a northern fruit. When there was not a tree nor a shrub to be found in the Shetland islands and the Orkneys, there were gooseberry bushes in abundance; and it was an old joke against the Shetlanders, that when they read their Bibles and tried to picture to themselves Adam hiding among the trees of the garden, they could only call up in vision a naked man cowering under a grosart bush. The gooseberries of Scotland are the perfection of their race, and for flavour and variety far beyond those of the south just as English gooseberries are better than those of the Continent. On the Continent they are little prized, and not very well known. The French have no name for them, distinct from that of red currants.
The gooseberry in cookery is used as a fruit pie; as a sauce for mackerel; and as Gooseberry Fool. This last word does not mean a fool, but comes from the French fouler, to crush. The following statement is borrowed, with a few slight alterations, from an old book of miscellaneous receipts. Gooseberry Fool.-"The good people of Northamptonshire maintain that all our best London cooks, in making gooseberry fool, are themselves little better than fools. There is no way, they insist, equal to their own, which is as follows:- After topping and tailing-that is, taking off clean the two ends of the gooseberries-scald them sufficiently with a very little water till all the fruit breaks. Too much water will spoil them. The water must not be thrown away, being so rich with the finest part of the fruit, that if left to stand till cold it will turn to jelly When the gooseberries are cold, mash them all together. Passing them through a sieve or colander spoils them. The fine natural flavour which resides in the skin no art can replace. The skins must therefore remain unseparated in the general mash. Sweeten with fine powdered sugar, Gourmand but add no nutmeg or other spice. Mix in at the last moment some rich cream, and it is ready. The young folks of Northamptonshire, after eating as much as they possibly can of this gooseberry fool, are said frequently to roll down a hill and begin eating again."
Gooseberry Sauce.-Boil half a pint of unripe gooseberries, and having poured off the water, rub them through a hair sieve. Mix the pulp thus obtained with a pat of butter, make it hot, and serve it for mackerel. This is enough; but a little ginger may be added, and taste may be consulted for sugar and for salt. The greening of spinach juice, which French cooks add, is very doubtful.
The goose paragraph is a set of serving notes rather than a method, but the two gooseberry receipts at the end are complete and still work. The hinge is in the fool: do not sieve, and do not throw away the cooking water.
- Green gooseA green goose is a young bird, killed at roughly three to four months and not fattened, which is why the book says its inside is merely seasoned with pepper and salt and it is rarely stuffed. Nothing sold now corresponds to it exactly; the smallest goose you can buy is the nearest thing.
- The forcemeat cross-referencesNos. 6 and 7 point to Kettner's Forcemeats entry, presumably the sage-and-onion and the chestnut stuffings in that order. Neither is reproduced here, so substitute any standard version: onion softened in butter with chopped sage and breadcrumbs, or cooked chestnuts mashed with the bird's liver and a little pork.
- Half a pint of gooseberriesAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, and half a pint of whole gooseberries weighs roughly 6 oz (about 170 g). That makes a small sauceboat, enough for two to three mackerel.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair mesh, standard kitchen equipment before fine wire sieves, and convenient for acid fruit, which could discolour on metal. Any nylon or stainless sieve does the job now, and the modern equivalent of "rub through" is a wooden spoon and a little patience.
- Unripe fruit for the sauceThe mackerel sauce depends on hard green gooseberries picked early in the season; ripe dessert varieties are too sweet and too soft, and the sauce turns into jam. If only ripe fruit is available, cut the sugar entirely and add lemon juice.
- Scalding for the foolUse only a few tablespoons of water and a lid, over low heat, until the skins split, five to ten minutes. The instruction to keep the liquid is sound: it is high in pectin, which is what sets it to jelly when cold and what gives the finished fool body.
- Do not sieve, and add the cream lastMashing skins and all is the whole point of the Northamptonshire method, and it gives a coarser, more strongly flavoured fool than the smooth London version. Fold in cold double cream, lightly whipped, only when the fruit is fully cold, or the cream will slacken and separate.
- YieldAbout 1 lb of gooseberries, sweetened to taste and folded with 1/2 pint of cream, serves four to six in glasses. It keeps a day in the refrigerator, though the fruit weeps a little.
- Sourcing gooseberriesFresh gooseberries are seasonal and scarce outside Britain and northern Europe; cultivation was long restricted in parts of the United States because Ribes species host white pine blister rust. Frozen fruit works perfectly for both receipts.
Kettner's is really a dictionary of the table, and this entry shows the form at its most characteristic: a cursory note on roast goose, then several hundred words of speculative etymology on the berry that traditionally sauced it. The old herbalists' claim that the gooseberry took its name from the bird is the neatest explanation but not a documented one; the more usual modern suggestion traces it to a borrowing or corruption of a continental form, and the dialect names collected here -- feaberry, groset -- are genuine regional variants recorded across the English and Scottish counties. The derivation of "fool" from French fouler, to crush, is the one the book asserts most confidently and the one etymologists are least sure of; "fool" in the sense of a trifling thing is at least as likely. What is solidly true is the pairing of sharp green gooseberries with rich, oily food -- goose, mackerel -- which is the same logic as apple with pork or rhubarb with duck, and the reason both receipts here are built on underripe fruit rather than sweet.