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Recipes

Gooseberry Fool by Jeremy Lee

A delight of compote, cream & custard
The best way to cook gooseberries destined for this quintessential fool, a delight of compote, cream and custard, is to bake them in the oven. Lay them in a single layer in a wide dish, sugar them liberally, cover with foil and bake, allowing the resulting flood of juice to disperse in a cloud of steam, producing the consistency of a compote. As gooseberries occasionally coincide with elderflowers, a spoonful of homemade cordial or indeed an umbel or two of the elderflowers themselves laid among the fruits imbues them with an appealing muscat flavour.

 Ingredients:

1kg gooseberries, topped and tailed

150g caster sugar

2-3 umbels of elderflower or a soup spoon of homemade cordial (optional)

 

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180 °C. In the widest dish possible, or several if needs must, arrange the gooseberries in one layer. Spoon the sugar evenly over the fruit (if pursuing the thought, add the elderflower or a spoonful of elderflower cordial; substituting the elderflower cordial for water will also work).

Cover the dish(es) tightly and bake for 35-40 minutes, checking from time to time they are not catching at the edges. Cool, pass through a sieve and refrigerate. This keeps well for a fair few days.

 

Taken from Cooking - Simply And Well, For One Or Many by Jeremy Lee. For more about Jeremy follow @jeremyleeqv
 
We spent 5 mins with Jeremy to learn just a few of his culinary secrets - from his greatest influences to his desert island ingredients…

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