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Gooseberry and Red Currant Jam
Allow two cups red currant juice to each four pounds of gooseberries and three pounds sugar. Make a syrup and place the berries in it, simmering forty minutes, till berries are translucent, when they are ready to seal.
A two-fruit preserve that relies on the gooseberry's own pectin, with red currant juice for acid and set. The proportions are sound; only the sealing instruction reflects vanished practice.
- The hinge: cook to a set, not to a clockForty minutes is a guide, not a rule — it depends on your pan and how ripe the fruit is. The recipe's real test is the berries turning translucent; confirm with a wrinkle test on a chilled saucer or 220F/104C on a candy thermometer.
- "Make a syrup"Dissolve the 3 lb sugar in the 2 cups currant juice over low heat, stirring until no grains remain on the back of the spoon, and only then add the gooseberries. Sugar added to the fruit undissolved will scorch on the bottom during a long simmer.
- Getting the currant juiceTwo cups takes roughly 1.5 to 2 lb of red currants, stems and all, crushed and simmered with a splash of water until they collapse, then strained. Bottled currant juice or unsweetened currant nectar works if you press the pulp out; sweetened cordial does not.
- Preparing the gooseberriesTop and tail them — the dried blossom end and stem stay tough and unpleasant through cooking. Slightly underripe green gooseberries carry the most pectin and give the firmest set.
- Pan and stirringUse a wide, heavy, non-reactive pan holding at least twice the volume of fruit; a preserving pan of 8 to 10 quarts is right for this quantity. Stir often near the end, when the mixture thickens and catches easily.
- "Ready to seal"For this period this meant hot jam into hot jars, often finished with a paraffin wax cap. Current practice is a boiling-water bath — clean jars, new two-piece lids, 10 minutes at a full boil, adjusted upward for altitude. Paraffin sealing is no longer recommended, as the wax pulls away and admits mold.
- YieldAbout 4 to 5 pints, or eight to ten half-pint jars, depending on how far you reduce it.
- Sugar ratioThree pounds of sugar to four of fruit is on the lean side for a long-keeping jam. It sets well because of the gooseberry pectin, but expect a fresher, tarter preserve with a shorter open-jar life than a one-to-one recipe — refrigerate after opening and use within a month.
Gooseberries and red currants ripen together in the same weeks of early summer, in the same corners of the same gardens, which is reason enough for the pairing: the currant supplies acid and colour, the gooseberry supplies body and pectin. Both are Ribes, and both were far more common in American kitchens when this book was written than they are now — in the decades after 1900 many states restricted or destroyed Ribes plantings because the bushes host white pine blister rust, a fungus that threatened the timber industry. The federal ban was lifted in the 1960s but state rules and simple unfamiliarity kept the fruit off American tables, and gooseberries remain far easier to find in Britain, where gooseberry jam and fool are still standard summer preserving, than in most U.S. markets. A recipe like this, printed without a word of explanation about where to get four pounds of gooseberries, belongs to a moment when the answer was the back garden.