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Gooseberry Sauce
Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in small saucepan, add two light tablespoons flour, stir well while heating for half minute and moisten with two gills hot milk. Season with half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne and half saltspoon grated nutmeg, then continually mix until it comes to a boil. Add, little by little, one-half ounce good butter and the juice of quarter of a lemon, mix well, strain through Chinese strainer into another saucepan, add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and keep warm. Pick off stems from a pint of fresh, sound gooseberries, then plunge them in quart of boiling water and boil two minutes. Drain on sieve and add to sauce, lightly mix and use as required.
A flour-thickened white sauce finished with butter and lemon, then studded with briefly blanched gooseberries — a sauce for oily fish rather than a dessert.
- Gills and saltspoonsTwo gills is one cup of hot milk. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon, so the cayenne is about 1/4 teaspoon and the nutmeg a pinch.
- Chinese strainerThat is the chinois, a fine conical sieve. Any fine-mesh strainer works; the point is to catch flour lumps before the berries go in, since you cannot strain the sauce afterward.
- Which gooseberriesThe recipe says only 'fresh, sound' berries, but a savoury sauce of this kind is generally made with hard, green, underripe fruit rather than the sweet ripe dessert sort; ripe berries collapse more readily and sweeten the sauce.
- Two minutes means two minutesThe berries are blanched only to soften the skins and take the raw edge off. Longer and they burst into pulp; the recipe wants them whole in a smooth sauce.
- Add the berries off the boilFold them in with the heat low and hold the sauce warm without simmering. Boiling after the fruit goes in breaks the berries and can make the butter finish separate.
- The butter finishThe half ounce (one tablespoon) of butter beaten in at the end is what gives the sauce its gloss. Work it in bit by bit off direct heat, as with any butter-mounted sauce.
- Yield and servingThe sauce base is about a cup; a full pint of gooseberries then goes into it, so the finished quantity is considerably larger. The recipe does not name a dish to serve it with, though a sharp gooseberry sauce of this type is traditionally paired with rich fish such as mackerel or herring.
Gooseberries and oily fish are an old pairing, most visible in the French name for the fruit, groseille eing \\"mackerel currant."