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Gooseberries and Cream
Pick off stems, thoroughly wash and carefully drain on a cloth a quart fresh, sound, large gooseberries. Place on a compotier. Sprinkle two tablespoons powdered sugar over, lightly mix. Whisk one and a half gills cream till well thickened but not quite to a froth, adding two tablespoons sugar; whisk for a minute, pour it over the gooseberries and serve.
A four-line dessert whose success rests entirely on the fruit: these are meant to be ripe dessert gooseberries eaten raw, not the hard green ones sold for pies and fools.
- Gills to cupsOne and a half gills is three-quarters of a cup (about 175 ml) of cream. A quart of gooseberries is roughly a pound, or 450-500 g.
- CompotierA footed glass or porcelain compote dish. Any shallow serving bowl works; the point is that the fruit sits in a single loose layer so the cream can reach it.
- Ripe fruit onlyRaw gooseberries picked early are aggressively sour and tough-skinned. Look for fully ripe dessert varieties — red, amber or translucent green, soft to a light squeeze. Underripe fruit will not be rescued by two tablespoons of sugar.
- Topping and tailingThe recipe says only to remove stems, but the dried blossom end should come off too. Pinch both ends with your fingers or snip with scissors.
- Powdered sugarIn 1906 this meant sugar ground fine, not modern confectioners' sugar cut with cornstarch. Use superfine (caster) sugar; it dissolves on the fruit without a starchy aftertaste.
- Whisking the cream"Well thickened but not quite to a froth" means soft, barely pourable — the stage before soft peaks. Use cream of at least 35 percent fat and stop while it still falls from the whisk in a thick ribbon.
- TimingSugar draws juice out of the berries within minutes. Mix and assemble immediately before serving, or the fruit sits in a thin syrup of its own juice.
- YieldServes four as written, or two generously.
Gooseberries were a far more familiar fruit in 1906 than they are now. English gooseberry clubs had spent much of the nineteenth century competing to grow the largest berry, and ripe dessert varieties were eaten out of hand as well as cooked. The dish here is deliberately unadorned, the kind of raw-fruit-and-cream course that could close a meal in place of a pastry. Its near-disappearance from American tables has a specific cause: Ribes species host white pine blister rust, and federal and state eradication programs beginning in the 1910s pulled out gooseberry and currant bushes across large parts of the country. Restrictions eased over the following decades, but the fruit never regained its former place.