Gooseberry Trifle
INGREDIENTS for one dish.-1 quart of gooseberries, sugar to taste, 1 pint of custard, a plateful of whipped cream. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 3d.
Put the gooseberries into a jar, with sufficient moist sugar to sweeten them, and boil them until reduced to a pulp.
Put this pulp at the bottom of a trifle-dish; pour over it a pint of custard made by recipe, and, when cold, cover with whipped cream. The cream should be whipped the day before it is wanted for table, as it will then be so much firmer and more solid; but it should not be added to the fruit until a short time before it is required. The dish may be garnished as fancy dictates. berries.
TIME.- About hour to boil the goose- SEASONABLE in May, June and July.
Gooseberry Vinegar. (An Excellent Recipe.) INGREDIENTS for 9 gallons.-2 pecks of crystal gooseberries, 6 gallons of water, 12 lbs. of foots sugar of the coarsest brown quality. AVERAGE COST, GOOSEBERRY WINE. when the gooseberries have to be purchased, 1s. per gallon.
Mash the gooseberries (which should be quite ripe) in a tub with a mallet; put to them the water nearly milk-warm; let this stand 24 hours; then strain it through a sieve, and put the sugar to it; mix it well, and tun it. These proportions are for a 9-gallon cask; and if it be not quite full, more water must be added. Let the mixture be stirred from the bottom of the cask two or three times daily for 3 or 4 days, to assist the melting of the sugar; then paste a piece of linen cloth over the bunghole, and set the cask in a warm place, but not in the sun; any corner of a warm kitchen is the best situation for it. The following spring it should be drawn off into stone bottles, and the vinegar will be fit for use twelve months after it is made. This will be found a most excellent preparation, greatly superior to much that is sold under the name of the best white wine vinegar. Many years' experience has proved that pickle made with this vinegar will keep, when bought vinegar will not preserve the ingredients. The cost per gallon is merely nominal, especially to those who reside in the country and grow their own gooseberries; the coarse sugar is then the only ingredient to be purchased. TIME. To remain in the cask, 9 months.
SEASONABLE. This should be made the end of June or the beginning of July, when gooseberries are ripe and plentiful.
A plain fool-and-custard layering rather than a sponge trifle: no cake, no sherry, just stewed fruit, custard and cream. The transcription runs on into the following entry for Gooseberry Vinegar, which belongs to a different recipe.
- QuantitiesA quart of gooseberries is roughly 1 lb 4 oz (about 570 g) of fruit, topped and tailed. A pint of custard means an imperial pint, 20 fl oz (568 ml), a scant 2 1/2 US cups. The recipe specifies only "one dish" and gives no number of servings.
- "Put the gooseberries into a jar"The jar stands in a pan of simmering water; the fruit cooks in its own juice with no added liquid. Cooking gooseberries directly in a pan works as well, over low heat with a spoonful of water to start them.
- Cooking timeThe time line has lost a fraction in transcription and reads "About hour"; the figure cannot be recovered from this text. Green gooseberries collapse in eight to ten minutes in an open pan, and you want a thick pulp, not a sauce.
- Sugar"Moist sugar" is soft light brown sugar. Green cooking gooseberries are sharp, so expect 4 to 6 oz per pound of fruit; sweeten while hot and taste, since the custard adds sweetness of its own.
- The fruit must be coldWarm pulp will thin the custard and warm custard will slump the cream. Chill the pulp thoroughly in the dish before pouring the custard over, and chill again before the cream goes on.
- Whipping the cream a day aheadThis worked with the thick, unhomogenised cream of the period. Modern whipping cream weeps and separates overnight; whip it on the day, to soft-medium peaks, and if you want insurance fold in a tablespoon of icing sugar.
- The custardThe cross-reference is to Beeton's boiled egg custard, milk and eggs sweetened and thickened over low heat and never allowed to boil; the exact proportions are not given on this page. A good pouring custard, not a set one, is what the dish wants.
- Garnish"As fancy dictates" leaves it to the cook; ratafias, crystallised fruit and angelica were common trifle garnishes of the period. A few whole poached gooseberries or slivered almonds do the same job.
Gooseberries were the great British soft fruit of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cheap, easy in a cold garden, and the subject of competitive growers' clubs in the industrial north where prize berries were weighed to the grain. That abundance explains why a Victorian household book carries pages of gooseberry entries in a row: trifle, fool, vinegar, wine, jam. The trifle here is a stripped-down one -- fruit, custard and whipped cream in layers, close kin to a gooseberry fool with a cream cap -- though sponge soaked in wine had been standard in English trifles long before Beeton wrote. Her "seasonable in May, June and July" suits the recipe's placement, and the dish is costed at 1s 3d.