Line some flawn rings the same as for apricot flawn (No. 3170); cut off with the tip of a small knife all the stalks and stems of some gooseberries; arrange them inside the flawn, one beside the other, very close together; bestrew plentifully with powdered sugar and cook in a hot oven. As soon as it is done remove, cool and cover with a layer of apple jelly (No. 3668) diluted in a little thick syrup.
A single-crust green gooseberry tart, written in Ranhofer's shorthand: the pastry, the glaze and the method of lining are all elsewhere in the book. Here is what you need to fill in.
Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and its dessert chapters are essentially a French pastry repertoire written for an American house: flan aux groseilles vertes is the plain green-gooseberry tart of French and English domestic baking, dressed up with a mirror of apple-jelly glaze. The doubled title, "flawn" beside flan, is a nice fossil — flawn is Middle English, from Old French flaon, and by the nineteenth century it survived mainly in cookbooks as a term for an open tart. Green gooseberries were a standard early-summer fruit in that period, valued precisely because they arrived before anything else and because their acidity and high pectin made them behave well under heat; the apple jelly finish does the same work as the commercial glazes a pastry cook would reach for now. The berry's near-disappearance from American markets came later, when Ribes plantings were restricted as part of the campaign against white pine blister rust."}