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Gooseberry Pudding
Take one and a half pints of green gooseberries, put them in a saucepan with a small quantity of water, and stew gently until soft but not broken. Drain, and mash them through a fine hair-sieve, using a wooden spoon. Warm slightly three-quarters of a pound of butter and beat it well with as much powdered sugar; then beat in the gooseberry pulp, eight eggs and four pounded lady fingers. Pour the mixture when quite smooth into a pie dish and bake it for half an hour. It may be served either hot or cold.
A rich baked pudding in the English manner — but for the eggs and butter, essentially a gooseberry curd set with cake crumbs. A few of its terms and proportions need translating.
- The hinge: add the eggs slowlyThree-quarters of a pound of butter creamed with sugar will break if eight eggs and a cup of wet fruit pulp go in at once. Beat the eggs in one or two at a time, then fold in the pulp and the crumbs last, so the batter stays emulsified rather than separating in the dish.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the phrase means granulated sugar ground fine — what would now be sold as caster or superfine. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will dull the flavour; use superfine, or pulse granulated briefly in a grinder.
- Quantity of fruitA pint here is a dry measure of volume. One and a half pints of gooseberries is roughly a pound, and after stewing and sieving yields about a cup of thick pulp. "As much powdered sugar" refers back to the butter: three-quarters of a pound of each.
- Green gooseberriesHard, underripe, intensely sour fruit picked before it colours — not the soft dessert gooseberry. If only ripe ones are available the pudding will be flat, and a squeeze of lemon restores some of the sharpness the butter and sugar are meant to balance.
- Hair sieveA fine sieve of woven horsehair, used because it did not react with acidic fruit. A nylon or stainless mesh strainer does the same work; the point is to leave the skins and seeds behind.
- Lady fingersPounded to crumbs, they act as the binder. Four fingers give about half a cup of crumbs — enough to steady the custard without making it cakey. Dry, crisp savoiardi work better than the soft supermarket kind.
- Oven and timingThe recipe gives no temperature, only 'half an hour'; a moderate oven of about 350F is a reasonable modern reading. Half an hour suits a shallow pie dish; a deeper one will want 40 to 50 minutes. It is done when the centre is just set and barely wobbles -- around 170-175F is the usual guide for a set custard -- as pushed further, an eight-egg custard weeps.
- YieldA generous 9- or 10-inch dish, serving eight to ten. It is very rich; cold, it firms to something closer to a curd tart filling and cuts more cleanly than it does hot.
Gooseberries were a British obsession long before they were an American one — northern England ran competitive gooseberry shows for prize-weight berries through the nineteenth century — and the fruit arrived in American cookbooks by way of English fools, tarts and baked puddings of exactly this type. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, assembled his 1896 volume as much from the standard European repertoire as from anything invented in his own kitchens, and this pudding is squarely in the older English tradition: acid fruit pulp beaten into creamed butter and eggs, bound with crumbs, and baked in a pie dish. Its near-disappearance from American cooking has a specific cause: gooseberries and currants host white pine blister rust, and eradication campaigns and state and federal planting restrictions from the 1910s onward pushed the whole genus Ribes out of commercial cultivation here for decades. Recipes like this one survive from the period just before that, when green gooseberries were still an unremarkable thing to buy by the pint.