Home › Pastry, Pies and Tarts › Gooseberry Tart
Gooseberry Tart
Stem the gooseberries. Put into a porcelain kettle with enough water to prevent burning and stew slowly until they break. Take off, sweeten well.
When cold, pour into pastry shells and bake with a top crust of puff paste.
Brush all over with beaten egg while hot, set back in the oven to glaze for three minutes. To be eaten cold.
A plain stewed-fruit tart from the era when gooseberries were a common garden crop and sugar was added by taste rather than by weight. Two things need attention: the sugar quantity, which the original leaves entirely to the cook, and the absence of any thickener.
- Which gooseberriesThe recipe assumes hard green cooking gooseberries, picked underripe and fiercely tart. Modern dessert varieties sold ripe and reddish are sweeter and softer, so they collapse faster and need noticeably less sugar.
- "Sweeten well" is the whole problemNo quantity is given because it depended on the fruit. For green gooseberries, start around 3/4 to 1 cup sugar per pound of fruit and taste while the purée is still warm; cold fruit tastes less sweet than warm, so err generous.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enamelled or lined pan, specified because gooseberries are acidic enough to react with bare iron or copper and take on a metallic taste. Any stainless or enamelled saucepan does the job.
- Stewing time"Until they break" is about 8-12 minutes over low heat for green fruit. Use only a few tablespoons of water; the berries release plenty of their own and you want a thick purée, not a soup.
- No thickener is givenStewed gooseberries are wet, and the recipe offers nothing to bind them. Cook the fruit down until a spoon drawn through the pan leaves a track, or the bottom crust will be sodden.
- Filling must be coldThe instruction to cool before filling is not optional here. Warm fruit melts the butter in the puff paste lid before it hits the oven and the top will not rise.
- OvenPuff paste wants a hot oven: 425F for the first 15-20 minutes to set the lift, then down to 375F for another 20-25 until the top is deep gold and the base is cooked through.
- The egg glazeBrushing beaten egg on a hot baked crust and returning it briefly is a period method for a high shine. Three minutes at the finishing temperature is enough; longer and the egg scorches.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 lb of gooseberries will fill a 9-inch tart, serving six to eight; the original speaks of 'pastry shells' in the plural, so it may have been intended for smaller tarts. To be eaten cold, as directed.
Gooseberries were one of the great English kitchen-garden fruits of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prized precisely because they were useful while still green and hard, weeks before anything else in the garden was ripe. Gooseberry tart and gooseberry fool were fixtures of early summer, and competitive gooseberry-growing clubs in the north of England kept dozens of named varieties in circulation. American cookbooks inherited the dish, though the fruit itself became scarce here in the twentieth century after white pine blister rust led several states to restrict Ribes planting, since the fungus alternates between currants, gooseberries and pines. A collection like The Bride's Cook Book includes it as a matter of course: a beginner's tart that requires no skill beyond stewing fruit and handling a bought or made puff paste, with the egg glaze as the one flourish that makes it look accomplished.