Gooseberry Fool
INGREDIENTS. -Green gooseberries; to every pint of pulp add 1 pint of milk, or 1/24 pint of cream and pint of milk; sugar to taste. AVERAGE COST, with milk, 6d. per pint.
Cut the tops and tails off the gooseberries, put them into a jar with 2 tablespoonfuls of water and a little good moist sugar; set this jar in a saucepan of boiling water, and let it boil until the fruit is soft enough to mash. When done enough, beat it to a pulp, work this pulp through a colander, and stir to every pint the above proportion of milk, or equal quantities of milk and cream. Ascertain if the mixture is sweet enough, and put in plenty of sugar, or it will not be eatable; and in mixing the milk and gooseberries add the former very gradually to these: serve in a glass dish, or in small glasses. This, although a very oldfashioned and homely dish, is, when well made, very delicious, and, if properly sweetened, a very suitable preparation for children. Iced and with a little whipped THE GOOSEBERRY.
GOOSEBERRY JAM. cream laid over, it is suitable for a dinner party as a sweet.
TIME. From to 1 hour.
SEASONABLE in May and June.
A gooseberry fool is fruit pulp loosened with dairy, and it lives or dies on sweetening. Beeton's warning that it "will not be eatable" without plenty of sugar is not rhetoric: hard green gooseberries are ferociously acidic.
- Sweeten in stagesSugar the fruit while it cooks, then taste again after the dairy goes in. Cold, diluted pulp reads far less sweet than hot pulp, so a fool that seemed correct in the pan will taste sour in the glass.
- Add the milk to the fruit, not the reverseGooseberry pulp is acidic enough to curdle milk if the fruit is dumped into it. Pouring the milk gradually into the pulp, off the heat and cool, keeps the mixture smooth.
- Cream behaves better than milkThe proportions in the ingredient line are garbled in the printing, but as it stands it calls for a pint of milk to every pint of pulp, or milk and cream in equal quantities. Cream, or half cream and half milk, resists curdling and gives the texture most modern cooks expect; Beeton lays whipped cream over the top for a dinner party.
- The jar in boiling waterThis is a bain-marie, used to stew fruit gently without scorching. A covered heatproof bowl set in a pan of simmering water does the same job; so does a heavy saucepan over low heat with the two tablespoons of water and a lid.
- Cooking timeGreen gooseberries will usually burst and collapse in about 10 to 15 minutes over direct low heat. The longer time indicated for the water-bath method (the printed figure is damaged, ending 'to 1 hour') reflects how slowly heat passes through a sealed jar, not how long the fruit needs.
- "Good moist sugar"Moist sugar was unrefined or partly refined cane sugar, damp and slightly sticky. Light brown sugar is the nearest thing; plain granulated works and gives a cleaner fruit flavour.
- SievingWorking the pulp through a colander removes skins and the coarser seeds. A medium sieve or a food mill gives a better result; a blender will not, since it chops the skins rather than removing them.
- Yield and servingA pound of gooseberries gives roughly a pint of pulp, and the finished fool will fill four to six small glasses. Beeton offers it either plain or iced; if you chill it, allow it a couple of hours, and eat it the day it is made.
- SeasonMay and June is the window for hard green gooseberries in Britain. Frozen gooseberries work throughout the year and need no thawing before stewing.
The fool is one of the oldest surviving English puddings, recorded by name from the sixteenth century, though what it first denoted is unclear: the earliest fools appear to have been cream dishes as much as fruit ones. The name's origin is uncertain; it is often said to come from the French fouler, to crush, though early writers may simply have meant something trifling. Gooseberries became the classic fruit for it because they were a common cottage-garden crop, ripened before most other soft fruit, and are so sharp that they need the cream. Beeton's note that the dish is "old-fashioned and homely" yet fit for a dinner party when iced and topped with whipped cream captures a recurring theme of her book: humble country dishes were being reframed for middle-class tables, provided they were presented in a glass dish rather than a basin.