Home › The Principles of Cookery › Gooseberries, Green, Compote Of
Gooseberries, Green, Compote Of
Top and tail a quart of gooseberries. Put them into boiling water for two minutes, and next into cold water, mixed with a table-spoonful of vinegar, for two minutes, to restore the colour, then drain them. Make a syrup by boiling three-quarters of a pound of loaf sugar in lumps, with one pint of water for ten minutes. Put in the gooseberries. Boil them gently for ten minutes, or until the fruit is tender but unbroken. Turn them out with the syrup, and serve cold. Sufficient for half a dozen persons. Probable cost, 7d.
A plain fruit compote of the sort Victorian cooks turned out by the quart in early summer. The technique is simple; the difficulty is sourcing hard green gooseberries and keeping them whole.
- The hinge: a bare simmerGooseberry skins split the moment the syrup boils hard. Keep it at the barest tremble and stop as soon as a berry yields to a skewer, which may well be under ten minutes with modern fruit.
- QuantitiesA quart of gooseberries is a volume measure, roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb (600-700 g) topped and tailed. Three-quarters of a pound of sugar is 340 g.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar was sold as a hard cone and broken into lumps; "in lumps" simply distinguishes it from coarser or less refined grades. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent.
- Top and tailSnip off the dried flower end and the stalk with scissors or a small knife. On very fine-skinned modern varieties this is still necessary, and it is the slowest part of the job.
- The vinegar dipThe two-minute blanch followed by acidulated cold water is given in the recipe as a way of restoring the green colour. It is optional; skip it and nothing is lost in flavour, though the fruit will be duller.
- Green means unripeThese are hard, sour, pale-green gooseberries picked before they colour, available for a few weeks in early summer. Ripe dessert gooseberries or frozen fruit are much more likely to break up in the syrup.
- ServingSix portions, served cold in the syrup, with cream, custard or a plain sponge finger. It will keep a few days covered in the refrigerator.
- The cost noteSevenpence for six is the book's household accounting, not a modern guide; ignore it except as a reminder that gooseberries were once among the cheapest fruits in an English kitchen.
Compote is a French term, in English culinary use from the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and common in cookery books by the nineteenth, for whole or halved fruit poached in sugar syrup and served in that syrup, as distinct from a jam, a preserve or a fool. Gooseberries were an obvious candidate: cheap, abundant, grown in cottage gardens and allotments across Britain, and the subject of competitive gooseberry clubs in the industrial north whose members bred berries for sheer size. Green gooseberries have a very short season before the fruit softens and colours, which is why the recipe assumes hard, sour fruit that will hold its shape, and why so many Victorian gooseberry recipes are about preserving that brief window. The vinegar-and-cold-water step belongs to a wider family of period tricks for keeping green vegetables and fruit green, an obsession of the era that also produced the far less advisable practice of cooking greens with a copper coin or a scrap of verdigris.