The Magic of Gooseberries

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In centuries past, gooseberries were allowed to linger on the bushes until November, giving a much longer picking season. This is understandable in an age when the lemon was a luxury, forthe gooseberry replaced it as a way of offsetting rich, fatty foods, such as mackerel, goose or mutton, with a sharp sauce.Gooseberries are areal old English fruit, grown in abundance in Tudor England, when they were ceasing to be 'feabes' and adopting their present name. There are hundreds of varietes listed in Hogg's Fruit Manual (1860)-all different in colour, shape and taste, and many imaginative ways that they were used in the kithen garden, as hedges or trained onto trellis. For centuries, it was the sweet varieties that led the field until, in 1874, the tax on sugar was repealed.There is an appealing modesty about this fruit which speaks of centuries of honest fare from the country and farmhouse kitchen.Since time immemorial,gooseberries went with Whitsuntide, the first berries ready then for the tarts, pies, tansies, fools and creamsor to be stuffed into a goose or made into a piquant sauce for mackerel or pork. It was Robert Southey who wrote 'I love gooseberry pie', and well he might, for what could be better than those sugared berries lurking beneath a burnished pastry crust?In Gloucestershire, the pies were raised, made with sweetened, hot-water pastry and filled up with apple jelly poured in through the top.The Elizabethans loved gooseberry tarts. One, from a recipe in A Good Huswife's Handmaid (1594), is a pie shell filled with gooseberries stewed in white wine with sugar and breadcrumbs, with the later addition of egg yolks. Generally, though, you cannot beat the berries peeping above a custard of double cream, egg yolks and sugar.No true Englishman would deny himself the fool, however calorific. The word itself means a folly, a feux d'esprit and not, as used to be thought, derived from the French word to crush, fouler. Rebecca Price gives a recipe for one that takes the dish back to late Stewart England. The early recipes for fools and creams seem almost interchangeable, but by the middle of the 18th-century the distinction becomes clear: one is a cream made of sieved gooseberries with the addition of eggs but no dairy cream; the other is sieved gooseberries mixed with either cream or an egg custard. This is already enshrined by Hannah Glasse in 1747 with the classic ratio of fruit puree to custard or cream as 50-50.Watch the colour of your mashed orsieved gooseberries, which can resemble that of a cow-pat. In the past, spinach juice was used, but a drop of green colouring will do the trick today. A fool looks best against white porcelain, either a huge bowl or rammekin dishes, the top enlivened by a scattering of roasted almonds, a little grated lemon peel, or a sliver of orange rind. Serve with long de chat, and never make it out of season. Reserve its cooling, mysterious flavour as a signal that early summer is here.The earlist recipe I can find with the fool's hidden coup de grace, the elderflower, is in a recipe for gooseberry jelly in May Byron's Pot Luck (1914). The habit of tying a head of flowers in a muslin bag and placing it in the gooseberries while they cook only appears in recent books. These rightly praise the magical, muscat flavour it bestows.An elderflower-scented gooseberry fool also makes the most marvellous ice-cream. The mixture is the same, but the fruit must be pureed and not mashed.Gooseberries also make superb jellies, chutneys and preserves. One particular favourite is gooseberry and mint jelly, wonderful with cold or roast lamb, translucent green, flecked with chopped leaves, which will make you vow to banish that dreadful vinegary mint sauce from your table forever.