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Gooseberry Pancakes
Put a lump of butter into a fryingpan; when it is melted, put in one quart of gooseberries previously snipped, and fry gently until tender; then take them out and mash them in a saucepan. Beat the yolks of six eggs, and whip three whites to a stiff froth; mix them with a teacupful of cream and finely-grated stale breadcrumbs, and a breakfast cupful of flour, pour them in the saucepan with the gooseberries, add sugar to taste, and stir over the fire until thick. Melt some butter in a fryingpan, and fry the preparation like pancakes. Put them on a hot dish, sift powdered sugar over, and serve.
A thick egg-and-crumb batter enriched with cooked fruit, closer to a German-style fried pudding than a breakfast pancake. The critical step is the cooked custard base, which will scramble if it gets too much heat.
- Snipped gooseberries"Snipped" means topped and tailed — the dried blossom end and stem clipped off with scissors or a small knife. A quart of berries is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb.
- Cup measuresA teacupful here is about 3/4 cup; a breakfast cupful is a full cup or slightly more. The breadcrumb quantity is not given at all, so start with about 1/2 cup of fine dry crumbs and judge by the batter, which should be thick enough to mound on a spoon.
- Don't let it boilSix yolks stirred into cream and fruit over direct heat is a custard. Keep the pan on low, stir constantly, and pull it off the moment it thickens and coats the spoon — a full boil will curdle the eggs and no amount of beating will bring it back.
- Three whites, not sixOnly three whites are whipped; the other three are left over. Note that the recipe mixes the whipped whites in with the yolks, cream, crumbs and flour before the mixture goes into the pan to be thickened, so the froth is largely cooked out; folding them in after the base has cooled slightly is a departure from the original.
- FryingDrop the mixture in spoonfuls into foaming butter in a heavy pan over medium heat and flatten gently. It is too loose to flip early — wait for a set, browned underside, about 3 minutes, before turning.
- Sourness and sugarCooking gooseberries are sharp; "sugar to taste" here means a good deal, on the order of 1/2 cup, added while the mixture is still warm so it dissolves.
- Sourcing the fruitFresh gooseberries are seasonal and regional in the United States. Frozen work well and need no thawing before frying; canned ones are already soft and should be drained and simply mashed.
- YieldMakes about a dozen small pancakes, enough for four to six as a dessert course.
Gooseberries were a staple of British and northern European kitchens long before they were a curiosity in American ones, and this recipe belongs to that tradition — a fried pudding of eggs, cream and crumbs bound around a sharp cooked fruit, of a kind that has often been linked, though loosely, to the sweet puddings of central European cookery. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name fronts this 1896 collection, gathered a great many such continental household dishes alongside the hotel's grander service recipes. The fruit's later scarcity in the United States has a documented cause: gooseberries and currants are alternate hosts for white pine blister rust, and beginning in the 1910s federal and state programs restricted their cultivation to protect the timber industry. Bans have since been relaxed in most places, but the fruit never recovered its footing in American cooking, which is why a recipe calling casually for a quart of them now reads as exotic.