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Gooseberry Tart
For this tart cover the outside of a round agate-ware baking dish, with Chopped Paste. Chill, bake. For filling mix four cups gooseberries, one cup sugar, few gratings lemon rind, few gratings nutmeg. Stew until gooseberries are tender; add two tablespoons butter. Use hot or cold in paste shell. Serve with cream or soft custard.
An unusual construction: the pastry is moulded over the outside of an upturned dish, baked free-standing, then lifted off and filled. Two things decide whether it works — a well-chilled paste and a dish with no lip to trap it.
- The hinge: mould, chill, then bake invertedTurn the baking dish upside down, butter the outside, and drape the rolled paste over it, trimming at what will be the rim. Chill until firm before it goes in the oven, or the shell slumps and tears as the fat melts. Cool a few minutes before easing the shell off, and use a straight-sided dish — anything with a flared lip or handles will lock the pastry on.
- "Agate-ware"Speckled enamelled steel, standard equipment in 1900s American kitchens. Any ovenproof bowl or cake pan of similar size and shape works; the point is a smooth, heatproof form, not the material.
- "Chopped Paste"A plain pie pastry cut together with a knife rather than creamed or worked by hand; the recipe assumes a separate paste recipe given elsewhere in the book. Substitute any all-butter shortcrust; roughly 1 1/2 cups flour should be enough for a shell of this size.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake the shell blind at 400–425F for 20–25 minutes, until it is set, dry and light gold — it has to be fully baked here, since nothing more will happen to it once filled.
- GooseberriesUse green, underripe fruit — the sour cooking gooseberry the recipe assumes, not the sweet dessert varieties. Four cups is roughly 1 1/4 lb. Top and tail them. Frozen work perfectly well; drain off some of the thaw liquid or the filling stays loose.
- Sugar and stewingOne cup to four cups fruit is on the tart side by modern taste; go to 1 1/4 cups if the berries are very green. Stew gently, uncovered, 8–12 minutes until the skins burst and the mixture thickens; gooseberries carry a lot of pectin and will set as they cool. Stir the butter in off the heat.
- Assembly and yieldThe recipe allows the filling hot or cold; either way a blind-baked shell will soften once wet fruit sits in it, so fill close to serving. A shell of this size will give perhaps six to eight portions. The "soft custard" is a stirred pouring custard (creme anglaise), not a set baked one.
Gooseberries were a fixture of nineteenth-century American and British kitchen gardens, valued because they crop early, in the gap between rhubarb and the summer berries, and because their high pectin and sharp acidity make them almost foolproof for tarts, fools and jams. Their disappearance from American cooking is largely regulatory rather than culinary: Ribes species host white pine blister rust, and state bans and the large federal eradication campaign, which dates mainly from the late 1910s and after, restricted or destroyed plantings to protect timber, so a fruit that a 1900s cookbook could take for granted became hard to buy within a generation. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it ranged well beyond the product it was meant to sell.