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Gooseberry Fool
1 pint gooseberries 1/2 pint (2 cups) boiled 1 teaspoonful lemon juice custard 1 gill (1/2 cup) water 2 tablespoonfuls cream 2 ozs. (4 tablespoonfuls) sugar Wash, top and tail the gooseberries, and put them into a saucepan with the water and sugar; stew them until they are tender and soft. Rub through a fine sieve with a wooden spoon, not a metal spoon as it injures the flavor and color.
When the custard is cold, stir it into the gooseberry purée, add the lemon juice, the cream and, if necessary, more sugar. Serve either in one large glass dish or in custard glasses, having it as cold as possible.
Two crumbled lady fingers are a nice addition to this dish. If more convenient the cream may be omitted, or, if wished, only cream used, and no custard.
Rhubarb fool is made in exactly the same way, using eight sticks of peeled rhubarb in place of the gooseberries.
Strawberry fool is made by merely rubbing the ripe strawberries through a sieve and adding a few drops of red color. Do not cook the fruit.
Gooseberry fool is at all times popular, but it is best when made with fresh fruit.
The name of this dish often puzzles people.
This is an example of the degeneration of a foreign kitchen term, a corruption which has destroyed the descriptive meaning. Originally the qualifying adjective was written foulé, because the stewed gooseberries were crushed before being mixed with the cream. In old French ménus the dish is given as "Groseilles foulés."
Apples
A simple two-part dessert: a stewed fruit purée — the only real work is in the custard and the chilling. The original assumes you already have boiled custard on hand from elsewhere in the book.
- A gillHalf a cup, as the recipe itself glosses. The two ounces of sugar is four tablespoons, or about 55 g.
- A pint of gooseberriesA dry measure of whole berries, roughly 12 oz / 340 g. Use hard green gooseberries, not the sweet dessert type; the sharpness is the point of the dish.
- Boiled custardNot a baked custard but a stirred pouring custard cooked over low heat until it coats the spoon. It must never actually boil or it will scramble. Two cups needs about 4 yolks to 2 cups milk.
- The hinge: everything coldStir the custard into the purée only when both are properly cold. Warm purée thins the custard and the fool will separate into a watery layer under a pale one. Chill the finished fool at least two hours.
- The wooden spoonThe advice against metal probably reflects the tinned and unlined iron utensils of the period, which could discolour acidic fruit. Modern stainless steel is inert; a food mill or a nylon sieve works, though the skins and seeds still need to be strained out for the proper texture.
- Rhubarb variationEight sticks is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb trimmed. Use only the stalks: rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are never eaten. Rhubarb releases far more liquid than gooseberries, so cook it with little or no added water and drain if it looks loose.
- Strawberry variationUncooked fruit, then. Because nothing is cooked, this version should be eaten the day it is made.
- CreamTwo tablespoons of pouring cream, not whipped. If you take the recipe's alternative and use cream alone with no custard, whip about a cup to soft peaks and fold the purée through for a looser, more familiar modern fool.
- YieldAbout four custard-glass servings. Lady fingers are best crumbled over at the table so they do not go to paste.
Fools are among the oldest surviving English desserts, recorded from the sixteenth century, and were originally little more than crushed fruit and cream or custard 1 gooseberry the classic version, because gooseberries ripen early and were a common kitchen-garden crop in Britain. The etymology offered here, from French foula (crushed), is a nineteenth-century guess that circulated widely in cookery books; lexicographers now generally trace fool to the same sense as trifle, a dish of no consequence, and the French menu spelling may well have been borrowed back from English rather than being the source of it. The book's insistence on fresh fruit is worth noting: white pine blister rust, carried by Ribes species, led several states to restrict gooseberry and currant planting, which is much of the reason the fruit remains uncommon in American markets.