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Gooseberry Souffle
Take the required quantity of gooseberries, sweeten to taste, pass them through a sieve into a tart-dish, and let them get cold. Cover over to two inches in depth with rich custard, then with the whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth, piling it in lumps, dust over with fine sugar, and bake in a very slack oven for a few minutes.
A Victorian-style tart of fruit purée, stirred custard and meringue, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: no quantities, no times, and an oven described only by feel. Three things need spelling out — the fruit must be stewed before it will pass a sieve, the custard is a stovetop one, and the oven is barely warm.
- Stew the gooseberries firstRaw gooseberries will not go through a sieve. Simmer them with sugar until they collapse, 8-10 minutes, then press through a fine sieve or push through a food mill; the skins and seeds stay behind. Cool the purée fully before the custard goes on, or the two will marble together.
- "Rich custard" means crème anglaise"Rich custard" means a stirred custard -- egg yolks, sugar and cream or milk, thickened over low heat to the point where it coats a spoon, then cooled. It is not a baked custard set in the oven, and it is not pastry cream.
- A very slack ovenAround 250-300F. The point is to set and faintly colour the meringue without warming the custard beneath it or weeping the fruit. At that heat "a few minutes" is likely to run longer than the phrase suggests; watch for the tips to take colour.
- Fine sugarCaster sugar, not confectioners'. Dusting the meringue before it goes in helps it crisp on the surface and reduces beading.
- Piling it in lumpsDeliberate: spoon the meringue on in rough peaked mounds rather than smoothing it flat. It bakes lighter, and the ridges are what catch colour in a cool oven.
- Tart-dishA shallow ovenproof dish, glass or earthenware, with no pastry involved despite the name. Nothing here is a soufflé in the modern sense — the lift comes from beaten whites sitting on top, not from a risen batter.
- Egg whites and low heatA meringue baked at 250-300F for a quarter of an hour does not bring the whites to a pasteurising temperature throughout. Worth knowing if you are serving anyone who avoids lightly cooked egg.
- YieldA 9-inch dish built as described serves six to eight. Assemble the day of serving; the meringue softens against the custard overnight.
Gooseberries were a British kitchen-garden staple long before they were an American one, and their sharpness made them a standard partner for cream and custard — gooseberry fool, gooseberry tart, and this sort of layered dish all trade on the same contrast. The recipe's habit of calling a meringue-topped fruit-and-custard dish a "soufflé" was common in nineteenth-century English and Anglo-American cookery, where the word covered nearly anything lightened with beaten whites rather than the specific risen dish it means now. That the fruit appears here at all is a small period marker: gooseberries largely disappeared from American markets after the early twentieth century, when the bushes were restricted across much of the country as hosts of white pine blister rust. Oscar Tschirky's book collects the working formulas of a large hotel kitchen, which is why the quantities are left to the cook.