Home › Fruit Desserts › Gooseberry Tart
Gooseberry Tart
1 pound green gooseberries 6 ounces sugar 2 tablespoons water Paste Pick the gooseberries, and put them in a tart dish; cover them with sugar, and put in the water. Cover with paste, and bake in hot oven. When the paste is baked, it is better to place the tart on the top of the stove to simmer until the gooseberries are quite tender. If the crust is carefully lifted with a knife, a skewer may be inserted to see whether the gooseberries are sufficiently cooked, as the tart will be spoiled unless they are quite soft.
A single-crust English fruit tart, baked crust-up over raw fruit. The whole difficulty is that pastry sets faster than hard green gooseberries soften, and the recipe's odd finishing step exists to solve exactly that.
- The hinge: don't stop when the crust is brownUnderdone gooseberries stay squeaky and sour, and no amount of sugar fixes it. The original finishes the fruit on the stovetop, which suits a range with a constantly hot top; in a modern kitchen, cover the browned crust loosely with foil and drop the oven to 325F until a skewer slides through the fruit without resistance.
- "Paste"Unspecified in the original; plain shortcrust is the safe reading, at the usual half fat to flour. Roughly 8 oz flour and 4 oz butter gives enough for a lid on a 9-inch dish, with a strip around the rim to seal it.
- "Tart dish"A deep pie dish or shallow baking dish with a rim wide enough to take a pastry border. A 9-inch pie plate holds a pound of fruit comfortably; the fruit should mound slightly so the lid does not sag onto it.
- "Hot oven"425F. Give it about 20 minutes at that heat to set and colour the pastry, then reduce as above for the fruit.
- Measures6 ounces sugar is a generous 3/4 cup granulated, closer to 7/8. Green gooseberries are aggressively tart, so this ratio is not excessive; taste one raw before deciding to cut it back.
- Sourcing the fruitGreen means underripe and firm, picked before the berries turn soft and translucent. Frozen gooseberries work here and need no thawing, though they release more liquid, so use the water sparingly or omit it.
- Steam and sealCut a small vent in the lid or the crust will lift off the filling in one dome. A tablespoon of sugar scattered on the pastry before baking, a common finish for English fruit pies, gives a crisp sugared top.
- YieldSix modest servings. Serve warm with cream or custard rather than chilled; the juices set to a thin syrup and are best still loose.
Gooseberries were a mainstay of British kitchen gardens and cottage plots well before they were much cultivated elsewhere, and the green, underripe fruit of early summer was valued precisely for its acidity in pies, fools and sauces. The single-crust "tart" here is the older English pattern: fruit into a dish, sugar over, a pastry lid on top, no bottom crust to go soggy. Recipes of this type appear in vegetarian and "meatless" cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a fruit tart being already meat-free. American readers may find the berry unfamiliar for a documented reason: gooseberries and currants host part of the life cycle of white pine blister rust, and cultivation was restricted in many US states from the 1910s onward, which broke the fruit's place in the national kitchen in a way it never fully recovered.