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Gooseberry Cream
Take two pounds of green gooseberries, put them in a saucepan with three breakfast cupfuls of water and boil them until they will easily mash; strain the juice through a fine sieve and weigh it; add one pound of loaf-sugar to every pound of fruit, return to the pan and boil for twenty minutes longer. Put one ounce of isinglass into a saucepan with a breakfast cupful of cream, stir it over the fire until dissolved, but not allowing it to boil, and then let the cream cool, stirring constantly. Let the gooseberry syrup get nearly cold, add the cream and the juice of a lemon, turn it into a mould and set it on the ice. This cream should be made at least twenty hours before needed for use.
A Victorian fruit cream: a sweetened gooseberry syrup set with gelatin and enriched with cream. The technique is sound, but two of the ingredients and one of the measures need translating.
- The hinge: keep everything cool when the acid goes inCream, lemon juice and a tart fruit syrup will curdle if combined hot. Let the syrup come down to barely warm and the cream to room temperature before they meet, and stir the lemon juice in last, gradually.
- IsinglassA gelatin made from fish swim bladders, chiefly sturgeon, once sold in leaves or shreds and now hard to find outside brewing suppliers. Powdered or leaf gelatin does the same job, but the setting power of old isinglass varied a great deal and does not map reliably onto a modern packet, so treat the one-ounce figure as unusable and set by the packet instructions for the total liquid volume instead.
- Never boil the gelatinThe instruction to dissolve it in cream "but not allowing it to boil" is not fussiness. Boiling degrades gelatin's setting power and can break the cream. Warm it just until clear.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, generally reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Reading it as a generous American cup is close enough for the water; for the cream, err on the smaller side.
- Loaf-sugarRefined white sugar, sold in solid cones or loaves and broken up with nippers. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent.
- Weighing the juiceThe pound-for-pound ratio applies to the strained juice, not the original two pounds of fruit, so weigh after straining. The finished cream will be sweet by modern taste; scaling the sugar back by a quarter is defensible.
- Green gooseberriesUnderripe, hard and very sour, which is what makes the dish work. Ripe dessert gooseberries or a frozen packet will give a softer, less bracing result and may need less sugar and more lemon.
- "Set it on the ice"The icebox. Refrigerate. The twenty hours is not exaggeration for a mould of this size; overnight and then some gives a clean turn-out.
- YieldA quart or more of set cream, serving six to eight. To unmould, dip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto a chilled plate.
Fruit creams of this kind — a sieved fruit syrup, cream, and a setting agent turned into a decorative mould — run straight through English cookery from the eighteenth century into the late nineteenth, and gooseberry was a common filling, the bushes cropping heavily in kitchen gardens and the hard green fruit being picked early. Isinglass, the fish-derived gelatin called for here, was a standard household setting agent before commercial powdered gelatin displaced it; it was also used to clarify beer and wine, which is the surviving use of the word. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and the compiler of this 1896 volume, was not a chef by training but an assembler of the hotel's working repertoire, much of it inherited English and French domestic cookery of exactly this sort.