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Gooseberry Water
Bruise the fruit, and press out the juice through a coarse sieve. Mix with it an equal quantity of water. Boil and filter the liquid. Sweeten it according to taste, and add a little lemon-juice. This will be a refreshing and agreeable beverage, if not made too sweet, which is a common fault. The exact amount of sugar required cannot be given, as it depends upon the acidity of the fruit. Time, a quarter of an hour to prepare. Probable cost, 4d. per quart.
A simple pressed-fruit cordial, closer to a barley-water or lemonade than to a squash. The whole point is restraint with the sugar, which the original says twice.
- Which gooseberriesHard, sour green gooseberries picked before full ripeness give the best result; dessert varieties left to ripen red are sweeter and flatter in flavour. Frozen gooseberries work well, since freezing ruptures the cells and makes the juice easier to press.
- Pressing the juiceA coarse sieve and the back of a ladle is exactly right. Do not use a blender — over-processing drives pulp and skin into the liquid and makes it cloudy and astringent.
- "Filter"In Victorian usage this means straining through flannel, a jelly bag or several folds of cloth to catch the fine solids that settle after boiling. A coffee filter or a jelly bag gives the same clear liquid; let it drip rather than squeezing.
- Boil brieflyBring the diluted juice just to a boil so that suspended solids drop out on standing, then take it off. Prolonged boiling dulls the fresh green flavour that the drink exists for.
- SugarThe book is right not to give a figure. Start around 100–125 g per litre of finished liquid, taste when cold, and adjust — sweetness reads much stronger warm than chilled.
- Cost and yield4d. per quart is a Victorian price and tells you only that gooseberries were cheap in season. A pound of fruit yields roughly 300 ml of juice, so about 600 ml of finished drink; scale from there.
- KeepingNothing here preserves the liquid. Treat it as a fresh drink, refrigerate, and use within three or four days; for longer storage it needs proper bottling or freezing.
Gooseberries were a major British garden fruit of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, grown in quantity in cottage plots and competed over at gooseberry clubs in Lancashire and Cheshire, where growers weighed single berries against each other. That abundance explains why a Victorian household dictionary treats gooseberry juice as an everyday drink rather than a novelty: the bushes cropped heavily in June and July, and much of the crop was too sharp to be eaten as dessert. Drinks of this kind — fruit juice, water, sugar and a little lemon — sat in the same family as barley water and lemonade, and were commonly recommended for the sickroom as well as the table, the acidity being thought cooling in hot weather. The compiler's complaint about over-sweetening reflects a period in which sugar had become cheap enough that heavy-handedness was an easy fault.