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Gooseberry Catsup
Make as for Currant Catsup, using five pounds gooseberries with two pounds of sugar.
This is a one-line variation that assumes you have the Currant Catsup recipe open in front of you, so the working details all live elsewhere. Fruit catsup of this era is a thick spiced sweet-sour sauce for meat, closer to a chutney than to bottled tomato ketchup.
- The missing half of the recipeYou need the currant version for the vinegar and spices; fruit catsups of this type combine the fruit with vinegar and warm spices, but the quantities are whatever the currant recipe specifies. Without those, this is just sweetened gooseberry pulp.
- Weight, not volumeFive pounds of gooseberries is about 4 to 5 quarts topped and tailed. Two pounds of sugar is roughly 4 1/2 cups granulated.
- Use underripe fruitHard green gooseberries carry far more acid and pectin than the soft blushed ones, which is what makes this thicken and keep. Fully ripe berries give a slack, oversweet sauce.
- Topping and tailingThe dry blossom end and the stem both need to come off, and there is no shortcut. Any snipped stems left in will show up as woody threads in the finished catsup.
- The hinge: cook it down slowly and stirGooseberry pulp with two pounds of sugar in it scorches easily once it thickens. Keep it at a lazy simmer in a wide heavy pan, stirring across the bottom, until a spoon drawn through leaves a track that holds briefly -- usually 45 to 75 minutes.
- SeedsGooseberries are full of small hard seeds. If you want a smooth sauce, press the cooked pulp through a sieve or food mill before the final reduction rather than after, when it is too stiff to work.
- Yield and keepingExpect about 3 to 4 pints. The original assumes hot bottling and sealing; treat it instead as a refrigerator condiment, or process filled jars in a boiling-water bath following current guidance for high-acid preserves.
- ServingSauces of this kind were served with cold roast pork, ham, goose and mutton, and it does that job well. It is too sharp and too spiced to use as a table ketchup for chips.
"Catsup" in nineteenth-century American cookbooks did not mean tomato — it meant a spiced sauce bottled for the store cupboard, and mushroom, walnut, oyster, currant and gooseberry versions all sat on the same shelf. Fruit catsups were a way of turning a glut of sharp small fruit into something that would carry the endless cold meat of a Victorian sideboard. Gooseberries were a staple of American kitchen gardens through the 1800s, which is why so many books of the period treat them as casually as this recipe does; the plant later fell out of general cultivation in the United States because currants and gooseberries host white pine blister rust, and federal and state restrictions on growing them held for much of the twentieth century. That is a large part of the reason gooseberry recipes feel unfamiliar to American readers today and entirely ordinary to British ones.