Goose Vegetable
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons. lb. of bread-crumbs, 1 onion, 1 teaspoonful of chopped parsley and herbs, 1 oz. of butter, pepper and salt.
AVERAGE Cost, 3d.
Soak the bread in cold water, squeeze it nearly dry and mash it, mix with it the herbs and onion minced. Butter a tin, put in the mixture, and put the remainder of the butter cut in small pieces on the top.
Bake in a good oven for 1 hour and serve hot.
TIME.-1 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Gooseberries, Compôte of.- INGREDIENTS for dish sufficient for 6 persons.--Syrup; to 1 pint of syrup allow a quart of gooseberries. "AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Top and tail the gooseberries, which should not be very ripe, and pour over them some boiling water; then take them out and plunge them into cold water with which has been mixed a tablespoonful of vinegar, which will assist to keep the fruit a good colour. Make a pint of syrup, and when it boils drain the gooseberries and put them in; simmer them gently until the fruit is nicely pulped and tender, without being broken; then dish the gooseberries on a glass dish, boil the syrup for 2 or 3 minutes, pour over the gooseberries, and serve cold.
A glass of liqueur is an improvement to this dish.
GOOSEBERRY CHIPS.
TIME.-About 5 minutes to boil the gooseberries in the syrup, 3 minutes to reduce the syrup.
SEASONABLE in June.
Gooseberry Chips. (Useful for Dessert.) - INGREDIENTS. - Gooseberries unripe and green, but quite full-grown; sifted loaf sugar.
Put the gooseberries when cleaned of tops and tails, into jars, and boil them in a copper till quite soft. To every lb. of pulp put 1/2 lb. of loaf sugar sifted; the sugar must be stirred in very gently.
Then pour out the sweetened pulp on flat dishes, about 1/3 inch thick, which must be set in the sun to dry. When sufficiently dried in the sun, the pulp may be cut into strips, and twisted into any fanciful shapes, bows, &c. - TIME.
For drying, according to the amount of the sun.
SEASONABLE at all times.
Note. These chips may be kept for years in tin boxes, if packed quite dry, with layers of paper between the rows.
Three separate entries run together here: a baked herb-and-breadcrumb stuffing to serve with goose, a compôte of gooseberries, and gooseberry chips — a sugared fruit leather dried in the sun. The notes below cover the measures, vessels and methods that no longer read plainly.
- Imperial measuresBeeton's pint is 20 fl oz and her quart 40 fl oz, not the US 16 and 32. A quart of gooseberries by volume is somewhere around 1¼ to 1½ lb of fruit, depending how they are packed.
- "A good oven"Beeton gives no temperature. For a baked stuffing of this kind a moderately hot oven, somewhere in the range 350-400F / 180-200C, is a reasonable modern reading; an hour at that heat gives a crisp top and a set interior. Cover loosely if it colours too fast.
- Stuffing baked apartThis is a meatless stuffing cooked in its own buttered tin rather than inside the bird, so it takes a crust on top. Soaked-and-squeezed bread, not dry crumbs, is what gives the soft centre -- the recipe says to squeeze it nearly dry, and left wetter than that the mixture will be sodden.
- The vinegar dipThe recipe's stated reason is colour: cold acidulated water helps hold the green. The cold plunge also halts the cooking after the scald, which suits fruit meant to pulp inside intact skins rather than burst.
- Syrup for the compôteA pint of syrup means sugar dissolved in water and boiled briefly; roughly equal weights of sugar and water is a common Victorian proportion for compôte syrups. Simmer the gooseberries in it about five minutes, as the recipe's timing says; they collapse quickly once the skins give.
- "Boil them in a copper"The copper is the large household boiling vessel used for laundry, not a copper pan. The jars of fruit stand in it in water — a water bath. Do not cook acidic fruit in bare unlined copper.
- Sun-drying the chipsThe timing is honestly given as "according to the amount of the sun," which in practice means several days of dry heat. In a damp climate the sweetened pulp will mould before it dries; a low oven or dehydrator is the modern equivalent, and the sheet must be leathery and non-tacky throughout before it is cut and stored.
- KeepingThe claim that the chips keep for years rests entirely on their being packed bone dry. Any tackiness left in the strips will ferment or mould in a sealed tin.
- Costs and yield3d for the stuffing and 1s for the compôte are Victorian retail prices and no guide to anything now. The stuffing is given for four persons, the compôte for six, each as one dish in a larger meal.
The gooseberry was an English kitchen-garden staple long before it was a dessert fruit, and Beeton's June seasonal note marks the short window when hard green berries — the kind wanted here, "unripe and green, but quite full-grown" — were plentiful and cheap. Northern England in particular had gooseberry clubs whose members competed to grow the heaviest single berry, a tradition generally traced to the late eighteenth century and still carried on in a few Cheshire and Yorkshire villages. Chips of this sort belong to the older confectioner's repertoire of dried sweetmeats made when a glut had to be turned into something that would sit in a tin until Christmas dessert; the same technique produced apricot and quince pastes across Europe. The baked stuffing reflects a different economy: goose is a fat bird, and a plain bread, onion and herb mixture cooked separately gave the household a second dish from the same oven without soaking up dripping.