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Gooseberries, Dried, for Winter Dessert
Cut the tops, but not the stalks, from two pounds of large ripe gooseberries, either red or green. Put them into a syrup made by boiling together a pound of sugar and a pint of water until rather thick. Simmer the goose-berries gently for ten or fifteen minutes, then pour them out with the syrup, and leave them until the next day. Then boil them again for ten minutes, drain the syrup from them, and spread them on a sieve before the fire to dry. They may be candied by dipping them into powdered sugar as they are taken out of the syrup. They should be stored between sheets of paper in tin boxes. Probable cost, 1s. for this quantity.
A two-day candying method that predates the dehydrator: the fruit is poached in a heavy syrup, rested overnight so the sugar penetrates, boiled again, then dried slowly. The hinge is gentleness — gooseberries burst if the syrup is at a rolling boil, and burst fruit will not dry to a firm sweet.
- Topping, not tailing"Cut the tops, but not the stalks" means snip off the dry blossom end and leave the little stem on as a handle.
- The syrupA pound of sugar to a pint of water is about 2 cups sugar to 2 1/2 cups water in US measure (the imperial pint is 20 fl oz). The recipe gives no temperature; "until rather thick" is roughly thread stage, in the region of 220-222F on a thermometer — a light syrup that threads off the spoon, not caramel.
- Keep it at a bare simmerTen to fifteen minutes at a true simmer is right for firm, just-ripe fruit; anything more vigorous splits the skins. If the berries are very ripe, prick each one with a needle first and cut the time to about eight minutes.
- Drying "before the fire"The fruit is set on a sieve in front of the hearth for slow, dry warmth; no temperature is given, and it would have been modest at best. Use an oven at its lowest setting with the door propped, or a dehydrator at 135F, on a rack so air reaches underneath. Expect 8-12 hours; the fruit should be tacky and leathery, not brittle, and not sticky-wet in the centre.
- CandyingRolling the hot drained fruit in sugar sets a dry coating that stops them clinging together. "Powdered sugar" here means finely ground granulated, i.e. caster or superfine. Do it while they are still warm and damp with syrup, then dry as above.
- StoragePaper between layers absorbs surface moisture; tin keeps light and air out. The real risk is under-drying, which invites mould in a sealed box — leave the fruit a day at room temperature after drying and check for weeping before you close the tin. Refrigerate if you are unsure.
- Don't waste the syrupThe drained syrup is heavily flavoured and full of pectin. Bottle it and use it for sorbet, soda, or brushing on cakes; it will set to a jelly if reduced further.
- Yield and costTwo pounds of fresh fruit will shrink considerably, though the sugar taken up offsets some of the water lost; the finished quantity is hard to predict. The "1s." is Victorian shillings and tells you only that this was a cheap luxury built on garden fruit and bulk sugar.
Gooseberries were the great British garden fruit of the nineteenth century, the object of competitive growers' clubs in the industrial north where prize berries were weighed to the grain. Because the season is short and concentrated in high summer, cooks worked hard at preserving the crop: bottling in water, jam, jelly, and — as here — candying and drying for the dessert course in winter, when fresh fruit meant stored apples and imported oranges. Drying fruit in successive baths of syrup is an old confectioner's technique, generally traced to medieval and Renaissance sugar work and applied in English households to everything from apricots to angelica; Cassell's Dictionary, compiled for middle-class kitchens in the 1870s and reissued for decades, presents it as ordinary household economy rather than a professional art. That the book bothers to give a probable cost is characteristic: its readers were expected to weigh the price of a dish against what it would put on the table.