Maria Konsenezoff
Stew fruit in a kettle of water, press through coarse sieve, return to kettle and add three-quarters of a pound of sugar to each pound of fruit, after it is pulped. Boil three-quarters of an hour and pour into jars and seal carefully.
Being an English girl, I must have jam for breakfast every morning.
The page opens mid-sentence with the tail of the preceding sweetbread recipe; the jam itself begins at the heading. Everything from "Stew fruit" onward is complete enough to work from, with a few adjustments.
- The stray first line"spoons to each pair of sweetbreads, and cover with" belongs to the recipe printed above this one and has nothing to do with the jam. Ignore it.
- Weigh after pulpingThe sugar ratio — three-quarters of a pound per pound — is measured against the sieved pulp, not the raw fruit. Skins, stems and seeds account for a noticeable share of the weight, so weighing at the wrong stage will oversweeten the batch.
- That ratio is low for jamModern preserving usually runs closer to equal weights of fruit and sugar. At 3:4 the jam will be tarter and softer, and it keeps less reliably once opened; refrigerate after opening and plan to use it within a few weeks.
- Skip the 45-minute boilGooseberries are high in both pectin and acid, so a sieved pulp sets fast. Boil hard and test for set at 220F/105C on a thermometer, or with a chilled saucer, rather than running the clock. Depending on batch size and pan, three-quarters of an hour may well carry the jam past set into something darker and more caramelized.
- "Stew fruit in a kettle of water"A kettle here is a large open pot, not a tea kettle. The recipe does not say how much water; use only enough to keep the fruit from catching, since gooseberries release a great deal of liquid as they burst.
- SievingPressing through a coarse sieve removes skins and the small hard seeds and gives a smooth, jelly-like jam. A food mill does the same job faster. Green, slightly underripe berries give the firmest set and the sharpest flavor.
- Sealing"Pour into jars and seal carefully" describes open-kettle canning, often finished with a paraffin cap. Current practice is to fill sterilized jars to a quarter-inch headspace and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes; paraffin seals are no longer considered reliable.
- YieldNo quantity of fruit is given, so no yield can be stated; how much you finish with depends on how much is lost to sieving and how far the pulp is boiled down.
Gooseberries were a British kitchen staple in a way they have never quite been in America — grown in cottage gardens, competed over by the gooseberry clubs of the English Midlands and north-west, and turned into fools, tarts and, above all, breakfast jam. The cook's closing line is the point of the entry: jam at breakfast was a marker of Englishness, and its absence would have been felt by an Englishwoman living away from home. The fruit itself became genuinely hard to find in much of the U.S. in the early twentieth century, when Ribes species were widely banned or eradicated as an alternate host of white pine blister rust; restrictions have since been relaxed in many states but the gooseberry never recovered its place in the American pantry.