Gooseberry Pie
Cover the gooseberries with cold water, and heat to boiling point, and drain off the water. To two cupfuls of gooseberries one cupful of granulated sugar, one tablespoonful of flour. Mix the sugar with the flour, then with the berries and bake between two crusts in pie pans.
A plain two-crust fruit pie with almost no direction beyond the filling ratio. The scalding step at the start is the part worth keeping.
- Why the blanch mattersGooseberries have tough skins and a great deal of acid; covering them with cold water, bringing it to a boil and draining tempers both, so the fruit softens in the oven instead of bursting and flooding the crust. Drain them well or the filling will be thin.
- Which gooseberriesThe recipe most likely assumes hard green cooking gooseberries, tart enough to warrant a full cup of sugar to two cups of fruit. With ripe dessert varieties, or the sweeter imported ones sold now, you may want to cut the sugar back somewhat.
- Top and tailThe book takes it for granted that the stem and dried blossom end have been pinched off each berry before cooking. Skipping it leaves woody bits through the filling.
- ThickeningOne tablespoon of flour to two cups of fruit is light by modern standards, especially with frozen berries, which release more juice. A tablespoon and a half, or a scant tablespoon of cornstarch, gives a filling that slices.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. Start at 425F for 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for another 30 to 40 minutes, until the juices bubble thickly through the vents.
- Pans and yield"Pie pans" is all the recipe says; period tins were generally shallower than the deep plates sold now. Two cups of fruit fills one modest pie; for a deep modern plate, increase the filling by half and keep the same proportions.
- VentingGooseberry juice boils up hard. Cut generous slits in the top crust and bake on a sheet pan to catch what escapes.
Gooseberries were a staple of American and British kitchen gardens through the nineteenth century, valued because they crop early, before other fruit, and because they cook well while still hard and green. English growers bred them competitively in the 1800s, and the fruit crossed to North America with the same enthusiasm, though it fell out of favour in the United States in the early twentieth century when Ribes species were widely destroyed as hosts of white pine blister rust, a campaign that left cultivation restricted in many states for decades. That collapse is one reason a pie this ordinary once was looks unfamiliar now. The recipe's terseness is typical of the period's household manuals, which assumed a cook already knew her pastry and needed only the proportion of sugar to fruit.