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Gooseberry Jam
Boil the fruit until perfectly tender, then add three-quarters of a pound of white sugar to every pound of fruit, and cook an hour.
Two lines of instruction that assume you already know what jam looks like when it is done. The proportions are sound; the timing is not.
- The hinge: cook to set, not to the clockAn hour of hard boiling after the sugar goes in will take gooseberry jam well past setting point and into caramel. Gooseberries are among the highest-pectin fruits going, and once the sugar has dissolved the jam will usually reach 220F (105C) in 10 to 20 minutes. Test with a thermometer, or with a spoonful chilled on a cold plate that wrinkles when pushed.
- Add a little water at the start"Boil the fruit until perfectly tender" presumes green, hard gooseberries with plenty of moisture, but they will still scorch dry. Allow roughly a quarter to half a cup of water per pound of fruit and cook gently until the skins burst and collapse.
- ProportionsThree-quarters of a pound of sugar per pound of fruit is a lower ratio than most modern jam recipes, which run at parity. It works here because of the fruit's acidity and pectin, but it also means the jam keeps less well once opened; refrigerate after opening and use within a few weeks.
- "White sugar" in 1900"White sugar" -- the specification distinguishes refined white sugar from the brown and unrefined sugars also in use. Ordinary granulated white sugar is what is meant; no need for jam sugar, since gooseberries supply their own pectin.
- Topping and tailingThe recipe says nothing about preparing the fruit. Pinch off the stem and the dried blossom end of each berry before cooking. Green underripe gooseberries give the sharpest, firmest set; fully ripe ones are sweeter and set more loosely.
- YieldTwo pounds of gooseberries with a pound and a half of sugar gives roughly four half-pint jars, depending on how far the jam is reduced.
- SealingThe recipe says nothing about how the jam is to be put up; period practice ran to hot jam in hot jars, sometimes under paraffin wax. For shelf storage today, fill sterilised jars leaving a quarter-inch of headspace and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Skip the wax.
- SkimmingGooseberry jam foams considerably. Skim the scum before jarring, or the finished jam will look cloudy; a small knob of butter stirred in at the end helps disperse it.
Gooseberries were a staple of British and northern European kitchen gardens and travelled to North America with settlers, where they were grown widely enough by 1900 to warrant a matter-of-fact entry like this one in a general household cookbook. Their appeal to the preserving cook was practical: they ripen early, before most other fruit, and they are so rich in pectin and acid that they set reliably without additions, which is why this recipe needs only two ingredients and no lemon. American gooseberry growing was curtailed not long after this book appeared, when Ribes bushes were found to host white pine blister rust and federal and state restrictions on planting them were introduced in the 1910s and 1920s; the fruit largely fell out of the domestic repertoire and has never fully returned to it, though many of those bans have since been relaxed.