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Spiced Gooseberries
Leave the stem and blossom on ripe gooseberries, wash clean; make a syrup of three pints sugar to one of vinegar, skim, if necessary, add berries and boil down till thick, adding more sugar if needed; when almost done, spice with cinnamon and cloves; boil as thick as apple butter.
A sweet pickle of the old school: fruit boiled down in a sugar-vinegar syrup until it is closer to a conserve than a pickle. The proportions are given by volume, and the spicing is left to the cook.
- The syrup ratioThree pints sugar to one pint vinegar is a 3:1 volume ratio — roughly 6 cups sugar (about 2 1/2 lb) to 2 cups vinegar. Household vinegar of the period was not standardised and its strength varied; modern 5 percent cider vinegar is a reasonable stand-in.
- Stem and blossom left onUnusual, and the recipe gives no reason for it; leaving the ends on may help the berries hold together through a long boil instead of collapsing into pulp. Many cooks will prefer to top and tail anyway and accept a looser, jammier result.
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- Ripe berries onlyGreen gooseberries are what many recipes of the period call for in pies; ripe ones, depending on variety, may be amber, yellow, pink or purple, sweeter and much softer. Fresh gooseberries are a short-season farmers' market item in the US; frozen work, though they break down faster.
- Spice quantitiesNone are given. About a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and half a teaspoon of ground cloves per quart of finished pickle is in keeping; whole spices in a bag, pulled before jarring, give a cleaner colour. The recipe adds them near the end, which keeps the spice flavour fresher.
- \As thick as apple butter\
- Judging thicknessApple-butter thick means a spoonful mounds and does not weep liquid on a cold plate. Expect 45 minutes to well over an hour of open boiling, and stir often in the late stages, since the sugar concentration makes scorching easy.
- StorageThe recipe gives no sealing instructions. Treat the result as a refrigerator preserve, or process filled half-pint jars in a boiling-water bath following current canning directions.
- Yield and servingThe recipe specifies no quantity of berries, so the yield depends on how much fruit is used. Sweet pickles of this kind were served in small dishes alongside roast pork, ham, cold beef or game, not eaten as jam.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877), compiled from Ohio housekeepers' contributions, includes recipes for sweet pickles — fruit put down in sugar and vinegar rather than brine — and it reflects a table where every dinner of roast or cold meat wanted something sharp and sweet beside it. Gooseberries were a staple of American kitchen gardens in the period precisely because they were reliable and prolific in cool northern summers, and because they fruited early; the crop came in faster than a household could eat it, which is why the same books offer gooseberry pie, gooseberry jam, gooseberry vinegar and this. Commercial gooseberry growing in the United States later declined for a reason unconnected to taste: Ribes plants host white pine blister rust, and state bans on planting them, beginning in the early twentieth century, kept the fruit off American markets for generations. Cinnamon and cloves as the spicing here is the standard English-derived pairing for spiced fruit.