Gooseberry Tart
INGREDIENTS for good-sized pie-dish.-1½ pint of gooseberries, 1/2 lb. of short crust, 1/4 lb. of moist sugar. AVERAGE COST, 9d.
With a pair of scissors cut off the tops and tails of the gooseberries; put them into a deep pie-dish, pile the fruit high in the centre, and put in the sugar; line the edge of the dish with short crust, put on the cover, and ornament the edges of the tart bake in a good oven for about 3/4 hour, and before being sent to table, strew over it some fine-sifted sugar. A jug of cream, or a dish of boiled or baked custards, should always accompany this dish, TIME.- hour.
SEASONABLE from May to July.
Gooseberry Tart. (From Bottled Fruit.) INGREDIENTS for small tart. 1 bottle Whybrow's bottled gooseberries, sugar to taste, puff-paste. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 3d.
Empty the bottle into a pie dish, take half the juice and boil it with 2 oz of white sugar till reduced in quantity, then set aside to cool. Put a little sugar with the gooseberries, having first taken away the remainder of the juice, add the syrup, and cover in the usual way with the paste.
When the tart is wanted in a hurry, the gooseberries should be put in the dish with half their juice and sugar to taste.
TIME.-15 minutes to bake the tart.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Two versions sit here side by side: one from fresh summer fruit, one from a bottle for out-of-season baking. Both are single-crust tarts in the English sense, with pastry over the top only.
- The dish, not a pieNothing lines the base. Pastry is laid along the rim of a deep dish and a lid set over it, so the fruit steams in its own juice. A 1.5-pint (about 850 ml) deep pie dish with a good lip suits the quantities given.
- A pint of gooseberriesMeasured by volume, this is roughly 1 lb / 450 g of fruit. Piling it high in the centre is deliberate: it supports the pastry lid so it does not sag onto the juice as the fruit collapses.
- Moist sugarSoft light brown sugar. A quarter pound is 115 g, which is on the modest side for gooseberries picked green and hard; taste a raw berry and add more if they are very sharp.
- Short crust quantityHalf a pound refers to the finished pastry, not the flour, so about 225 g rolled out. Chill it before it goes over the hot-sweet fruit.
- A good ovenAround 400F / 200C for the first fifteen minutes to set and colour the crust, then 350F / 180C for the rest of the three-quarters of an hour. Stand the dish on a tray; gooseberry juice boils over readily.
- Whybrow's bottled gooseberriesA commercial brand long gone. Substitute a jar or can of gooseberries in light syrup, about 1 lb / 450 g drained weight.
- Fifteen minutes on the bottled versionThat timing assumes a thin puff lid over already-cooked fruit, and it wants a hot oven, 425F / 220C, to get any lift. Give it 20 to 25 minutes and check that the underside of the pastry is cooked rather than merely browned on top.
- ServingEnough for four to six. The sifted sugar over the hot crust and the accompanying cream or custard are not optional flourishes in this tradition; the fruit is deliberately left tart.
Gooseberries were the great British hedge and cottage-garden fruit of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with competitive gooseberry clubs in the north of England weighing prize berries to the grain. Because the fruit sets early and is used green, the tart marks the very start of the fruit season, which is why the entry is seasonable from May to July, before currants, raspberries or plums arrive. The second version, built on a bottled brand, shows the later Victorian and Edwardian household adjusting to commercially preserved fruit: the same dish, off the shelf, at any time of year, and at a cost of 1s. 3d. against 9d. for the fresh. Boiling down half the juice with sugar before it goes back into the dish is a sensible correction for bottled fruit, which carries far more liquid than raw gooseberries do.