Home › The Principles of Cookery › GOOSEBERRY JAM, RED (another way)
GOOSEBERRY JAM, RED (another way)
Allow a pint of red currant juice, prepared as for red currant jelly, and three pounds of loaf sugar to every four pounds of gooseberries. Put the sugar and the juice into a preserving-pan, and boil for five minutes after the sugar is dissolved. Add the gooseberries, and boil all gently together for forty minutes. Pour out the contents of the pan, and on the following day put the berries into jars, boil the syrup for a quarter of an hour, and pour it over the fruit. Cover closely. Probable cost, 9d. per pound jar. Sufficient for about four pounds.
A two-stage jam: the fruit is cooked in a currant syrup, rested overnight, then the syrup is reduced and poured back over the whole berries. The point of the method is to keep the gooseberries intact rather than let them collapse into a pulp.
- The hinge: the overnight restStanding the fruit in syrup overnight lets sugar migrate into the berries so they plump rather than shrivel, and it lets you concentrate the syrup separately without overcooking the fruit. Skip it and you have ordinary gooseberry jam.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a cone and broken up for use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent; weigh 3 lb (about 1.35 kg) to 4 lb (1.8 kg) fruit.
- Red currant juice"Prepared as for red currant jelly" means currants simmered with a little water until they burst, then strained through a jelly bag without pressing. A pint is 20 fl oz in this British book, roughly 2 1/2 US cups. The juice is here for pectin and acid as much as flavour.
- Preserving-panA wide, shallow, unlined copper or brass pan. Use the widest heavy-based stainless or enamelled pan you own; surface area is what drives evaporation, and a deep narrow pan of jam is much likelier to scorch before it sets.
- The gooseberriesThe recipe does not specify a variety; the red of the title comes from the currant juice, not the fruit. Ripe rather than hard, very green berries will take up the syrup better. Top and tail them.
- Forty minutes, then fifteenBoth timings are longer than a modern jam-maker would expect: the first is an explicitly gentle simmer to cook the berries through, the second a further quarter-hour on the drained syrup to concentrate it. Test the syrup rather than trusting the clock -- a drop on a cold plate should wrinkle, or read 220F/105C.
- Covering closelyIn this period that meant a paper or parchment cover tied over the top of the hot jam, relying on the sugar concentration alone. Fill sterilised jars while everything is hot and seal with modern two-piece lids, or give filled jars a 10-minute boiling-water bath, and store any jar that fails to seal in the refrigerator.
- Yield and costAbout four 1 lb jars. The 9d per pound is a retail price note of the period, of no use as a conversion but a reminder that these books were written for households keeping accounts.
Gooseberries were a British obsession in the nineteenth century: gooseberry clubs in the industrial north competed to grow the heaviest single berry, and dozens of named varieties, red, yellow, green and white, were in circulation. Cassell's gives several gooseberry jams, and red currant juice is added here rather than commercial pectin, which was not yet a household product. The currants ripen at much the same time as the gooseberries, so the two-fruit jam is a matter of what was in the garden in the same week; the borrowed juice supplies both the colour the title promises and the set. The two-day whole-fruit method belongs to the older tradition of "preserving" as distinct from jam, where keeping the fruit visibly intact in clear syrup was the mark of a careful cook.