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Gooseberry Cheese
Pick the tops and stalks from some rough red gooseberries, fully ripe. Bake them in a moderate oven till soft, then pulp them through a fine sieve. Let them boil very gently, and add, a little at a time, a quarter of a pound of loaf-sugar to every pound of fruit-pulp. Boil, skim, and stir it for half an hour; then pour it on small plates, and dry it before the fire, or in a cool oven. When dry, keep the cheese between folds of white paper. Time, half an hour to boil. Probable cost of gooseberries, 3d. per pound.
This is a fruit "cheese" in the old English sense: a stiff, dried fruit paste, closer to a leather or a membrillo than to anything dairy. The whole result depends on driving off water slowly, so the drying stage matters more than the boiling.
- Moderate ovenFor softening the fruit, read this as around 350F. The gooseberries only need to collapse enough to pulp, and there is no browning wanted.
- "Cool oven" for dryingThe finishing stage is the lowest heat your oven will hold, 120-150F, door propped slightly ajar, or a dehydrator at the same setting. "Before the fire" meant many hours of gentle radiant heat, not a bake.
- Rough red gooseberries"Rough" refers to the hairy skin; these are red-skinned sorts left on the bush until fully ripe, rather than the hard green berries picked early for cooking. Green ones will give a sharper, paler paste.
- Loaf sugarRefined cane sugar broken from a cone. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent; caster dissolves faster into the hot pulp.
- The sugar ratio is lowFour ounces of sugar to a pound of pulp is about a quarter of what a modern fruit cheese uses, so sugar is doing very little preserving here. Keeping quality comes entirely from drying the slabs until they are leathery and no longer tacky in the centre.
- Skim and stir without scorchingA thick fruit pulp with little sugar catches easily. Use a heavy pan, keep the heat low, and stir into the corners; the half hour is a minimum, and you want the pulp thick enough to hold a channel when the spoon is drawn through.
- Small platesLine shallow plates or a rimmed tray with baking parchment and spread the pulp about a quarter-inch thick. Much deeper and the centre is slow to dry.
- StorageThe folded white paper is there to stop the slabs sticking to each other and to let residual moisture escape. Because the sugar is low, store the wrapped pieces in a tin somewhere cool and dry and check them for mould over the first fortnight; refrigeration is safer if your kitchen is humid.
- YieldThe recipe names no quantity. As a rough guide, a couple of pounds of gooseberries will give well under their weight in sieved pulp and, after drying, a few small slabs to cut into squares to serve with cheese or at the end of a meal.
Fruit "cheeses" take their name from their form rather than their content: the paste was set in a shallow mould, turned out as a firm round, and cut in slices like a cheese. Damson and quince were the usual bases in English households, and the technique is a cousin of Spanish membrillo and Portuguese marmelada, all of them ways of holding a glut of fruit through the winter before reliable canning. Gooseberries earned a place in the line-up because Britain grew them obsessively in the nineteenth century, with northern gooseberry clubs competing over the size of dessert berries and hundreds of named varieties in circulation, red-skinned "rough" sorts among them. The frank note of cost, threepence a pound, is typical of a book written for a household counting the housekeeping money.