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Gooseberry Tarts
(England.) Make as many shells of puff paste as required; bake them until light; when cold, fill them half-way with gooseberries cooked to a puree, and cover with whipped cream, sweetened. Serve at afternoon tea.
A tea-table assembly rather than a baked tart: the shells, the fruit and the cream are made separately and put together at the last minute. The gooseberries are the whole point, and they need far more sugar than the recipe bothers to mention.
- Fill at the last momentPuff pastry softens quickly once wet fruit sits in it, so fill shortly before serving. Bake and cool the shells, keep the puree and cream chilled separately, and assemble as the tea goes out.
- Puff paste shellsUse tartlet tins or cut rounds. The recipe gives no temperature; puff paste generally wants a hot oven (around 400-425F) and should be baked until fully puffed and dry through the layers — "light" here probably means crisp and pale gold rather than blond and doughy. Press the centres down while still warm to make a hollow.
- The gooseberriesThis means hard green cooking gooseberries, picked underripe, not the soft dessert varieties. Frozen ones work; if you cannot get either, a tart rhubarb or green plum puree behaves similarly, though the flavour is not the same.
- Sugar for the pureeGreen gooseberries are aggressively acid. Stew them with a few spoonfuls of water until they burst, then sweeten to taste — figure roughly 4 to 6 oz sugar per pound of fruit — and cook down until thick enough to mound on a spoon. Sieve if you object to the skins.
- Cooling the pureeIt must be cold and stiff. Warm fruit will melt the cream and soak the pastry within minutes.
- Sweetened creamWhip heavy cream to soft peaks with about a tablespoon of sugar per cup; a little more will hold its shape better against the acid fruit. Overbeaten cream weeps into the pastry.
- YieldRoughly a pound of gooseberries and a cup of cream should fill about a dozen 2-inch tartlets, depending on how far the puree is reduced.
Gooseberries are an English fruit in a way they have never quite been an American one. Through the nineteenth century northern English growers ran gooseberry clubs and shows, competing to raise the heaviest single berry, and the hard green fruit turned up in fools, tarts and vinegar-sharp sauces for oily fish. In the United States the story diverged: currants and gooseberries were widely restricted in the early twentieth century as hosts of white pine blister rust, and the fruit never recovered its place in American kitchens, which is why a recipe this simple can now be surprisingly hard to shop for. Its appearance here, tagged "(England.)", marks it as an English dish, and the instruction to serve it at afternoon tea places it in the tea-table repertoire rather than at dinner.