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Baked Ripe Gooseberry Pudding (Stew one and a half pound)
830. Stew one and a half pound of ripe red gooseberries in a jar, put in the oven or a saucepan of water until they will pulp, take a pint of the juice, press it through a coarse sieve, mix it with three eggs well beaten, and one ounce and a half of butter, then sweeten and bake in a dish lined with a thin paste. A few crumbs of roll, or four Q ounces of Naples biscuits, should be mixed with the above to make it firm.
A baked custard tart in the eighteenth-century manner, thickened with crumbs rather than flour. The recipe assumes you know how to line a dish with pastry and how much sugar you like, so both need filling in.
- The hinge: pulp, then strainThe fruit must collapse completely before you sieve it, or you will lose most of the pulp to the mesh. The recipe allows either the oven or the jar standing in a saucepan of water; the latter keeps the fruit from catching. No time is given, so work by eye until the fruit will pulp.
- A pint of juice is optimisticOne and a half pounds of gooseberries may well give less than a pint of thick pulp once sieved. Use what you get rather than diluting to make up the pint; a British pint here is 20 fl oz.
- Naples biscuitsA dry, sweet finger biscuit, near enough to modern sponge fingers or savoiardi. Crush them fine. "Crumbs of roll" means fresh breadcrumbs from a plain white roll, which give a softer set.
- SweeteningNo quantity is given. Ripe gooseberries still need a good deal: start at 4 oz caster sugar per pint of pulp, taste the cold pulp before the eggs go in, and go to 6 oz if the fruit is sharp.
- Thin pasteA short crust rolled thin. Blind-bake it for about 15 minutes with baking beans before filling, or the wet fruit custard will leave the base sodden.
- OvenBake at 350F (180C) for 35-45 minutes, until the centre is set with only a slight wobble. Any hotter and the eggs curdle at the edges before the middle firms.
- Butter and eggsAn ounce and a half of butter is about 3 tablespoons; melt it and beat it into the warm, not hot, pulp so the eggs do not scramble on contact.
- YieldFills a 9-inch tart dish and serves six. Good warm rather than straight from the oven; it firms as it cools.
Gooseberries were the great English soft fruit of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, grown in cottage gardens and competitively exhibited by gooseberry clubs in the industrial north, where growers bred berries for sheer size. Many cookery books of the period treat them green and sour, for fools and boiled puddings; this one specifies ripe red fruit, which is sweeter and closer to a dessert gooseberry, and handles it like a fruit-curd custard. The Naples biscuit was a common store-cupboard thickener for such puddings before cornflour, and it turns up in the same role in cheesecakes, tansies and orange puddings. Recipes of this shape — sieved fruit, eggs, butter, sugar, baked in a thin crust — belong to the same family as the seventeenth-century English "pudding in a dish" and are of a piece with the later lemon tart.