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Gooseberry Fool
Stew gooseberries until soft, add sugar, and press through a colander (earthen is best), then make a boiled custard, or sweeten enough rich cream (about one gill to each quart), and stir carefully into the gooseberries just before sending to table. -Mrs. L. S. W.
A two-ingredient dessert that lives or dies on the fruit: gooseberries want to be green and hard, not ripe and sweet, so the acidity carries the cream. The instructions are loose even by the standards of this book, and the cream ratio is the part to read twice.
- The cream ratio is ambiguous"About one gill to each quart" reads as half a cup of cream per quart of sweetened purée, which is far leaner than any fool served today — closer to a fruit sauce with cream stirred through. Modern fools run anywhere from one part cream to two parts fruit up to equal parts. Add the cream gradually and stop where the flavour balances.
- A gillFour fluid ounces, half a cup. A quart is four cups, so the original ratio is 1:8 by volume.
- GooseberriesUse firm green (underripe) fruit, not the sweet dessert varieties. Top and tail them first; about 2 lb gives roughly a quart of purée. Frozen gooseberries work and need no thawing before stewing.
- Stewing and sugarA splash of water in the pan is enough — the berries release plenty. Ten to fifteen minutes over low heat bursts them. Sugar goes in after they soften, as directed: roughly 3/4 to 1 cup per 2 lb, added to taste once you can judge the sourness.
- Why earthenwareGooseberries are strongly acidic, and the preference for an earthen colander is usually explained by reactive metals such as tin, iron and copper giving acidic fruit a metallic taste and a dull cast. Stainless steel, nylon or plastic are all fine now; avoid bare aluminium and cast iron.
- Boiled custardPeriod usage for a stirred egg custard, not a custard actually brought to the boil. Cook it gently, over low heat or in a bowl set over hot water, to 170-175F, until it coats the spoon, then strain and chill. If it boils it scrambles.
- Fold, do not beatThe instruction to stir in "carefully" and "just before sending to table" is the hinge. Both fruit and cream (or custard) should be cold and combined at the last moment; the fruit's liquid will loosen the cream if it stands.
- YieldTwo pounds of fruit with cream makes six to eight small servings. Serve cold in glasses, with a thin crisp biscuit or sponge fingers.
A fool is one of the oldest surviving English dessert forms — the name appears in sixteenth-century cookery, and it is sometimes linked to the French fouler, to crush or press, though that derivation is often said to be a folk etymology, with the likelier sense being simply "trifle, something foolish." Gooseberries were the classic fruit for it, and their sharpness stands up to cream in a way that ripe soft fruit does not. That The Dixie Cook Book carries it, contributed by a subscriber and offered with either boiled custard or plain sweetened cream, shows how thoroughly the English fruit-and-cream repertoire had settled into Southern household cooking by the 1880s; the custard alternative also tells you something practical about a kitchen where cream was not always to hand thick enough to whip.