Home › Fruit Desserts › Strawberry or Gooseberry Fool
Strawberry or Gooseberry Fool
1 pound of either fruit 1/2 pound sugar 1 gill of water or milk 1 gill of cream Cook the fruit in the water or milk with the sugar for twenty minutes, or until tender and well cooked; then rub through a sieve with a wooden spoon. When the fruit is cold add the cream, mix well, and serve cold.
A two-ingredient dessert that lives or dies on the fruit purée being fully cold before the cream goes in. The rest is arithmetic.
- A gillHalf a cup in American measure, 5 fluid ounces in British books. Either reading works here; the fruit's own juice matters more than the exact liquid.
- Half a pound of sugarJust over a cup of granulated sugar. That is a lot by current taste for strawberries. Gooseberries genuinely need it; with strawberries start at half and adjust.
- Water or milkWater is the safer choice. Acidic fruit, gooseberries especially, can curdle milk over a long simmer, and little is gained from it once the cream goes in at the end.
- Twenty minutes is for gooseberriesTwenty minutes suits gooseberries -- Hard green gooseberries want that long to burst and soften. Strawberries collapse in five to eight minutes and only get more watery after that.
- Rub through a sieveA food mill or a fine-mesh strainer does the same job. Do not substitute a blender: it pulverises gooseberry skins and strawberry seeds into the purée instead of leaving them behind.
- Cold before creamThe hinge of the recipe. Warm purée thins the cream and the fool will not hold. Chill the purée completely, then fold in the cream.
- Whip or pourThe instruction to "mix well" gives a pourable fool in the older style. For the thicker, spoonable version, whip the cream to soft peaks and fold it in loosely so the purée streaks through.
- YieldAbout 3 cups, serving four. It will not keep past a day; the fruit weeps and the cream slackens.
A fool is one of the oldest surviving English desserts, recorded from the sixteenth century and standing alongside trifle and syllabub in the family of dishes built on cream and crushed fruit. The name is generally traced to the French fouler, to crush or press, though that derivation is traditional rather than settled; contemporaries seem simply to have used "fool" as they used "trifle," for something light and of no consequence. Gooseberry was the canonical version, since gooseberries ripen early, are too sharp to eat raw, and break down into pulp obligingly.