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Gooseberry Tartlets
Take the required quantity of green gooseberries, put them in a saucepan of boiling water and let them bubble for two or three minutes; then put them in a basin, sprinkle sugar over and let them cool. Rub three-quarters of a pound of butter in with one pound of flour, put in two tablespoonfuls of sugar and one pinch of salt; beat together the yolks of three eggs and a little water, and with them mix the flour to a smooth paste. Take about fifteen tartlet-moulds, butter and line them with the paste. Take the gooseberries out with a skimmer and put some in the center of each tart. Reduce the liquor from the gooseberries in a saucepan with a little syrup until quite thick. When cold, pour a little over each tart, and serve with a little whipped cream on top.
A rich egg-yolk shortcrust filled with barely-cooked green gooseberries and glazed with their own reduced juice. The original assumes a professional pastry cook and leaves out the step that matters most.
- The missing instructionNowhere does the recipe say to bake the shells, yet it must be done. The original gives no oven temperature or timing; in modern terms, line the moulds, chill, and blind bake in a moderate oven until pale gold and dry, then cool. The likeliest reading is that the cooked fruit and glaze go into finished, cold shells.
- Green gooseberriesThese are hard, sour, underripe fruit picked in early summer, not the sweet dessert varieties. Frozen gooseberries work; if only ripe ones are available, cut the initial boil to about a minute and expect to add less sugar.
- The pastry ratioThree-quarters of a pound of butter to one pound of flour is a very rich sweet paste, closer to a French pâte sablée than an American pie crust. It will feel soft and short at the mixing stage, so chill it well before rolling or it will tear in the moulds.
- "Rub in"Rub the cold butter into the flour to the texture of coarse meal before the yolks go in, and stop mixing as soon as the dough coheres. Working it further develops gluten and the shells will shrink down the sides of the moulds.
- Vessels and toolsA basin is a mixing bowl. A skimmer here is a slotted spoon; the point is to lift the fruit out and leave the syrup behind. Tartlet moulds were small -- a standard muffin tin, or any small shallow tins, will stand in; you will need about fifteen.
- "A little syrup"This means plain sugar syrup, roughly equal parts sugar and water boiled together. Reduce the gooseberry liquor with a few spoonfuls of it until it coats a spoon heavily; it sets firmer as it cools, so pull it earlier than looks right.
- Yield and servingAbout fifteen small tartlets, one or two per person. They are best assembled the day they are eaten, since the wet fruit and glaze soften the pastry within a few hours.
Gooseberries were a fixture of English and northern European kitchens long before they reached American hotel menus, and their brief early-summer season made them a marker of the calendar in a kitchen that ran on seasonal produce. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, is full of this kind of small European pastry work, set down in a professional's shorthand. The technique of reducing the fruit's own cooking liquor with sugar syrup for a glaze is standard classical practice, and the recipe opens with a two-or-three-minute boil.