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Gooseberry Pie
Line the edges of a deep pie-dish with rich puff paste, fill the dish with cleaned and picked gooseberries and put half a pound of moist sugar with them; pour in a little water, cover the pie with more puff paste moistening the edges so they will stick to the undercrust, cut it evenly all round, make a slit in the top with a knife, and bake in a moderate oven. When cooked take it out, sprinkle powdered sugar over, and serve with a good custard.
A plain English pie-dish pie of the sort Oscar included alongside the hotel's French work. Almost everything hinges on the fruit being underripe and the crust arrangement being understood correctly.
- Only the rim is lined"Line the edges of a deep pie-dish" means a strip of pastry pressed around the lip of the dish, not a full bottom crust. The fruit sits directly in the dish and the lid is sealed to that strip, which is how an English deep pie-dish pie is built.
- Quantity of fruitNo amount is given. A deep dish of about two quarts takes roughly 2 lb of gooseberries, which puts the half pound of sugar at a reasonable ratio for hard green fruit.
- Which gooseberriesThis wants the firm, green, sharply acid berries picked before ripening, not the soft dessert varieties. They must be topped and tailed, which is what "cleaned and picked" covers.
- Moist sugarMoist sugar is soft, damp, partly refined sugar. Light brown or unrefined soft brown sugar is the nearest thing on a modern shelf; granulated white will work but gives a cleaner, flatter sweetness.
- A little waterTwo or three tablespoons at most. Gooseberries throw a great deal of juice and there is no thickener here, so any generosity produces soup under the lid.
- Oven"Moderate" is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F; the book gives no temperature. The recipe asks only for a moderate oven throughout, so if you want more lift from the puff paste you are departing from it: a modern approach is about 425F for the first fifteen minutes, then down to 350F for another 35 to 45 minutes until the juices bubble through the slit.
- Powdered sugarIn 1896 this meant finely ground sugar rather than the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar sold today. Caster sugar is the closer equivalent, and it is sprinkled on while the pie is hot so it half dissolves.
- The custardThe recipe says only "a good custard." With a hot fruit pie this most likely means a stirred pouring custard, served cold or barely warm alongside, rather than a set baked one, though the text does not specify.
- YieldSix to eight servings from a standard deep dish.
Gooseberry pie is one of the oldest fixtures of English fruit cookery, the fruit being hardy, absurdly productive, and usable while still hard and green, weeks before anything else in the kitchen garden. Its appearance in a Waldorf book of 1896 is a reminder that Oscar Tschirky's kitchen, for all its French vocabulary, was feeding an Anglo-American clientele who expected plain nursery puddings as well as consommés, and that a pie "served with a good custard" was the standard English way to finish it. The dish is harder to reproduce in the United States now than it was then: gooseberries and currants are alternate hosts for white pine blister rust, and control programs beginning in the early twentieth century led to federal and state restrictions on growing Ribes, which is why the fruit largely disappeared from American markets and only returned in patches as those rules were relaxed.