Omelette and a Glass of Wine (38 page)

It was at about this time that the epergne, a standing centre-piece with branched supports for the dessert was coming into fashion. At the Princess of Wales’s at Richmond on July 15th 1720 Lady Grisell noted that the ‘Deseart’ was ‘a big dish in the Midle with connections and frute only’, and on April 12th 1725, at the Duke of Chandos’ magnificent house at Canons, near Edgware, with ‘A Duson at Table’ there was ‘ane Eparn in the Midle.
¹
Again in 1727 ‘We was eight days at Twitenham. We had always an Eparn in the midle’. It is interesting to note that when an epergne stood on the table, there were no creams, jellies, or syllabubs in glasses mentioned in the dessert course, but Lady Grisell herself did not yet possess such an ornament and for her own dinners still served ‘sweetmeats and jelly and sillibubs’, curds and cream, pears and apples, ‘pistaches and scorcht almonds, Bisket round the milk’ in the old way in separate dishes, in glasses on footed salvers, and in sweetmeat glasses.
²

For those interested in tracing the evolution of our national dishes, the brief recipe on page 245 shows how the syllabub and the trifle were eventually amalgamated to make one glorious sticky mess. Then, looking back into the old recipes for English fruit fools, we find that trifles, syllabubs, creams and fools have all at some point merged one with the other. In the history of cookery nothing is conveniently consistent.

English Fruit Fools

‘Our frailties are invincible’. Robert Louis Stevenson

Soft, pale, creamy, untroubled, the English fruit fool is the most frail and insubstantial of English summer dishes. That at any rate is how it should be, and how we like to think it always was. Here the old cookery books interrupt the smooth sequence. The seventeenth-and eighteenth-century writers do describe a number of fruit fools, fools made from gooseberries, raspberries, strawberries, redcur-rants, apples, mulberries, apricots, even from fresh figs; but few of these dishes turn out to be the simple cream-enriched purées we know today. Some were made from rather roughly crushed fruit (the French word
foulé
, meaning crushed or pressed must surely
have some bearing on the English name), often they were thickened with eggs as well as cream, sometimes they were flavoured with wine and spices, perfumed sugar and lemon peel.

Two hundred years ago it was those recipes listed under the heading of creams which were much more like the fruit fools of today. Evidently, at some stage, it came to be appreciated that the eggs and the extra flavourings were unnecessary, that they even distort the fresh flavour of the fruit. This is especially true of berry fruits and of apricots. Gradually the delicacy now regarded as the traditional English fruit fool came to be accepted as a purée of fruit plus sugar, fresh thick cream, and nothing more.

Like the syllabub, the fruit fool was almost always served in glasses or custard cups, although Susannah MacIver, an Edinburgh cookery teacher and author of an excellent little book called
Cookery and Pastry
, 1774, directs that her gooseberry cream be served on an ‘asset’, the old Scots word for platter.

From the following few recipes it is easy to see that there was never any
one
method of making English fruit creams and fools, and that over the past three centuries the two have fused. In the process some charming variations have disappeared. Some of these would be worth reviving, for example Elizabeth Hammond’s gooseberry or apple trifle quoted on page 240 and Robert May’s beautiful ‘black fruit’ mixtures.

In this selection of old and modern recipes I give precedence to those dishes made from the gooseberry, because green gooseberry fool is – to me at any rate – the most delicious as well as the most characteristic of all these simple, almost childlike, English dishes.

GOOSEBERRY FOOL

This is my own method of making gooseberry fool.

2 lb. of green gooseberries; ½ lb. of sugar; a minimum of ½ pint of double cream.

Wash the gooseberries. There is no need to top and tail them. Put them in the top half of a double saucepan with the sugar, and steam them (or if it is easier bake them in a covered jar in a low oven) until they are quite soft. Sieve them through the mouli having first strained off surplus liquid which would make the fool watery. When the purée is quite cold add the cream. More sugar may be necessary.

Later in the season when gooseberries are over, delicious fools can be made with uncooked strawberries; a mixture of raspberries
and redcurrants, also uncooked; and blackberries, cooked as for gooseberries; but in this case I think that cream spoils the rich colour of the fruit and should be offered separately.

To me it is essential to serve fruit fools in glasses or in simple white cups, and with shortbread or other such biscuits to go with them.

ICED GOOSEBERRY FOOL

I quart green gooseberries; ½ lb. white sugar; 1 pint of whipped cream; brandy or maraschino; vegetable greening; a little water; grated lemon peel.

‘Stew very slowly one quart of green gooseberries with half a pound of white sugar and enough water to prevent fruit from burning. Rub through a hair sieve and use a very little vegetable greening to make it a pretty colour. (Add brandy or maraschino if required.) One pint of cream whipped stiff and grated lemon peel. Mix well together and freeze. Should take two hours to freeze and should be worked with a wooden spoon from time to time.’

Ruth Lowinsky,
Lovely Food, a Cookery Notebook
, Nonesuch Press,
London, 1931

I find this recipe most interesting. The thirties was the decade when smart hostesses took to serving a great many dishes iced or frozen simply for the originality of the idea. In England at this time it was quite avant garde to possess a refrigerator. Iced camembert cream, frozen horseradish sauce, and tomato ice all belong to this period. I remember a cook of my childhood whose great dish was a
crème brûlée
in which the layer of glass-like caramel concealed, not the usual egg-thickened cream, but a delicate and softly frozen gooseberry fool.

Ruth Lowinsky’s book is a true period piece, which is to say that in its time it was bang up to date. The recipes and the suggested menus evoke the days of English parlourmaids handing round every course in silver-plated entrée dishes far too big for the food they contained, while the illustrations of table decorations devised by Mr Thomas Lowinsky depict such conversation stimulators as ‘two dead branches in an accumulator jar’, or ‘a spiral of chromium-plated steel pierced with holes through which the stems of flowers are passed’. Today’s equivalents do not adorn our tables. They are worn by our guests. The clanking camisoles and the chain mail adornments of the sixties are certainly less static than the table
decorations of the thirties; they exist surely for the same reason, to invite comment.

In sharp contrast the redundant vegetable greening and liqueurs in Mrs Lowinsky’s gooseberry fool recipe hark back to Hannah Glasse and the mid-eighteenth century. Hannah Glasse’s book,
The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy
was first published in 1747; in the 1751 edition appears what is possibly the first English printed recipe for an ice cream.
¹
The formula is for a simple raspberry purée and cream mixture which today we should call a raspberry fool. Mrs Glasse directs that the cream be frozen in ‘pewter basons’. What else are our fruit fools but the basis of modern cream ices or frozen desserts?

In the next recipe, the fool has amalgamated with the syllabub
and
the trifle, the gooseberry fool taking the place of the cake at the bottom of the dish. An attractive recipe.

GOOSEBERRY OR APPLE TRIFLE

‘Scald a sufficient quantity of fruit, and pulp it through a sieve, add sugar agreeable to taste, make a thick layer of this at the bottom of your dish: mix a pint of milk, a pint of cream, and the yolks of two eggs: scald it over the fire, observing to stir it: add a small quantity of sugar, and let it get cold: then lay it over the apples or gooseberries with a spoon, and put on the whole a whip [a syllabub] made the day before. If you use apples, add the rind of a lemon grated.’

Elizabeth Hammond,
Modern Domestic Cookery and Useful Receipt
Book, c.
1817

The next recipe comes from a work compiled by two eighteenth-century London publicans.

TO MAKE GOOSEBERRY FOOL

‘Put two quarts of gooseberries into about a quart of water, and set them on the fire. When they begin to simmer, turn yellow, and to plump, throw them into a cullender to drain out the water, and with the back of a spoon carefully squeeze the pulp through a sieve into a dish. Make them pretty sweet, and let them stand till they are cold.
In the meantime, take two quarts of milk, and the yolks of four eggs beaten up with a little grated nutmeg. Stir it softly over a slow fire, and when it begins to simmer, take it off, and by degrees stir it into the gooseberries. Let it stand till it be cold, and then serve it up. If you make it with cream, you need not put any eggs.’

Francis Collingwood and John Woollams,
The Universal Cook and City and Country Housekeeper
, 1791

The main point of interest about the book from which the foregoing recipe is extracted is the French translation which appeared in Paris in 1810.

The flow of English translations from French cookery books has been well-sustained ever since the mid-seventeenth century when La Varenne’s celebrated
French Cook
appeared in England. French kitchen terms peppered throughout English cookery books, and half-anglicized names of French dishes are no novelty to us. When for once the tide runs in the reverse direction we get a new view of our own cookery, and a revealing insight into the oddness of traditional names as they appear in another language.

In the case of
Le Cuisinier Anglais Universel ou Le Nec Plus Ultra de la Gourmandise
there are some interesting metamorphoses, as well as signs that the translator was defeated by the names of some of our cherished specialities, among them
le catchup
and
le browning
(‘to even the most skilled of French cooks these sauces will be new’, says the publisher’s preface). The syllabub turns up as
Eternel Syllabub, syllabub solide
, and
syllabub sous la vache.

La plume
of the French translator gives a new aspect to several of our old sweet dishes, among them the trifle which as
bagatelle
, regains something of its lost charm. Cheesecakes also return to grace and elegance as
talmouses.
As for
folie de groseilles vertes
it is no longer perfidious Albion’s frailty, serene and cool, but a wild whirl of summer gaiety and greenery.

I fancy that across the channel where Napoleon’s wars were ravaging all Europe, our two innkeepers fell flat as pancakes, and were it not for the felicities of their translator they would scarcely be worth comment. All their recipes had been borrowed – by their own admission – from earlier works and their style is charmless. It is a relief to turn back to something with the flavour of originality, an evocation of a truly pastoral summer dish, half fruit fool, half syllabub.

TO MAKE CREAM OF SUNDRY KINDS OF FRUITS

‘Take either currants, mulberries, raspberries or strawberries, sprinkle them with a little rose-water; press out the juice, and draw the milk out of the cow’s udder into it; sweeten it with a little sugar, and beat it well with birchen twigs, till it froth up; then strew over it a little fine beaten cinamon, and it will be an excellent mess. You may do this with the juice of plums, gooseberries, apricots, figs, or any juicy fruit.’

The Family Magazine Containing Useful Directions in All the Branches of House-keeping and Cookery
, 1741

Now two seventeenth-century gooseberry dishes:

TO MAKE GOOSEBERRY CREAM

‘Codle them green, and boil them up with sugar, being preserved put them into the cream strain’d or whole scrape sugar on them, and so serve them cold in boil’d or raw cream. Thus you may do strawberries, raspas, or red currans, put in raw cream whole, or serve them with wine and sugar in a dish without cream.’

Robert May,
The Accomplisht Cook
, 1660

TO MAKE A GOOSEBERRY HUFF
¹

‘Take a quart of green gooseberries boil them and pulp them thro’ a sieve, take the whites of 3 eggs, beat them to a Froth, put it to the Gooseberries and beat it both together till it looks white, then take ½ pound refin’d sugar, make it into a Syrrup with Spring Water, boyl it to a Candy, [i.e. to the small thread] let it be almost cold then put it to the Gooseberries and Eggs and beat all together till tis all froth, which put into Cups or Glasses – Codlings [green apples] may be done the same way.

‘N.B. Eleven Ounces of Codlin pulp’d thro’ a sieve is a proper quantity to the above Eggs and Sugar.’

Dorset Dishes of the 17th Century
, edited from MS. receipt books and published by J. Stevens Cox, The Toucan Press, Guernsey, 1967

BLACK FRUIT FOOL OR BLACK TART STUFF

This is a recipe adapted from a dish evidently popular three hundred years ago in the days of the Stuarts, when a purée of dried prunes, raisins and currants cooked in wine was used as a filling for tarts and
pies. Recipes for this ‘black tart stuff’ as it was called appear in at least two cookery books of the second half of the seventeenth century. One of these books,
The Accomplisht Cook
of 1660 has already been quoted on pages 231 and 242. It is a most beautiful piece of cookery literature. The author, Robert May, worked in a number of grand and noble households, including that of the Countess of Kent, whose book of medical receipts appeared posthumously in 1653 under the title
A Choice Manual, Or Rare Secrets in Physick and Chirurgery.
Published together with
A Choice Manual
was a little book of cookery receipts entitled
A True Gentlewoman’s Delight
, often also attributed, although probably wrongly, to the Countess of Kent.