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Gooseberry Cream Without Cream
Take your goseberries and wash them well, cut off the stalk and the black tip of each. Stew them with sugar till they are tender, just covered in water. Do not let them burn. If you have not time to attend to that put them in the oven in a shallow dish sprinkled with brown sugar. When tender rub them through a fine sieve at least twice. Flavor with a few drops of lemon juice, and add sugar if required. Then beat up a fresh egg in milk and add as much arrowroot or cornflour as will lie flat in a salt spoon. Mix the custard with the gooseberries, pass it through the sieve once more and serve it in a crystal bowl.
A gooseberry fool made with a thin egg custard in place of cream, from a wartime collection where cream was scarce. The original assumes you know how to handle the custard, which is the one step it does not spell out.
- Cook the custardThe recipe gives no quantity of milk; beat one egg into enough milk to make a thin custard (roughly a cup) with the starch, then thicken it in a saucepan over low heat, stirring constantly, until it coats the spoon, around 170-180F. Raw egg beaten into cold milk will neither thicken nor set, and the finished cream should not be served with the egg uncooked.
- Which gooseberriesThis wants hard green cooking gooseberries, not the sweet dessert varieties. About 1 lb of fruit to 3-4 oz sugar is the usual starting ratio; taste after sieving, since green fruit varies enormously in acidity.
- "The black tip"That is the dried remains of the blossom at the end opposite the stalk. Topping and tailing matters here because those fragments stay tough and gritty even after sieving.
- Oven methodThe alternative to stewing is the oven, in a shallow dish with brown sugar; the recipe gives no temperature, no covering and no time, but a low oven until the fruit collapses will do. This is gentler than the stovetop and less likely to scorch.
- Sieving twiceNot fussiness: gooseberry skins and seeds are coarse and one pass leaves the puree gritty. A fine-mesh sieve and a rigid spatula work better than a food mill, which tends to push skin through.
- Salt spoon of cornflourAn old salt spoon holds roughly a quarter teaspoon; "as much as will lie flat" in one means a scant quarter teaspoon of arrowroot or cornstarch. Cornflour in a British-influenced text is cornstarch, not masa or fine cornmeal.
- Combining and chillingFold the warm custard into the puree and sieve once more to catch any lumps of set egg. The recipe says only to serve it in a crystal bowl and gives no chilling time; chilled or not, it sets soft, closer to a pourable fool than a mousse.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities, but a pound of fruit with a cup of custard would serve about four. It is served from a single crystal bowl, which suits the pale, cloudy green colour.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in Britain in 1915 from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion, and its usefulness at the time was partly patriotic and partly practical. The title of this recipe explains itself: an egg-and-milk custard thickened with a trace of arrowroot stands in for cream, though the motive is a matter of inference rather than record, since the wartime pressure on dairy supplies came later. Gooseberry fool is a long-established dish in Britain and northern Europe, generally traced to the abundance of hard green gooseberries in early summer, well before other fruit ripens; the fruit is too sour to eat raw and too pectin-rich to ignore, so it was stewed, sieved and slackened with whatever dairy the house had. The instruction to sieve at least twice is a reminder that smoothness was a mark of good work in a period with no blender, only a horsehair or wire sieve and a wooden spoon.