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Gooseberry Jams
When used alone cook the gooseberries as for jelly, using the pulp for jams; strain to remove skins and seeds; allow equal weight of sugar and cook to thickness desired. Or, fresh berries may be cooked down in their own juice, adding, when tender, equal weight of sugar.
Gooseberries and strawberries in equal weight make a delicious jam and gooseberries with raspberries or some one of the citrus fruit marmalades form a most agreeable combination.
A method rather than a formula: the writer assumes you know how jam behaves and gives you ratios instead of quantities. The important thing here is that gooseberries are among the most pectin-rich fruits in the kitchen, so this sets easily and quickly.
- Equal weight means weightWeigh the prepared fruit or pulp and match it with the same weight of sugar. A pound of fruit to a pound of sugar yields roughly three half-pint jars. Measuring sugar by cup against fruit by cup will throw the ratio badly off.
- "Cook as for jelly"Top and tail the berries, put them in a heavy pan with just enough water to keep them from catching (a quarter cup per pound is plenty), and simmer covered until they collapse, about 10 to 15 minutes. Green, underripe berries carry the most pectin and acid; fully ripe ones make a sweeter jam that sets less firmly.
- Straining the pulpPress the cooked fruit through a food mill or a coarse sieve to leave skins and seeds behind. Skipping this step gives a rougher, more marmalade-like jam; the second method in the text does exactly that, since it mentions no straining.
- Judging "thickness desired"Add the sugar off the heat, stir until dissolved, then boil hard. Setting point is 220F on a candy thermometer, or when a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer wrinkles when pushed. With gooseberries this often comes within 8 to 12 minutes of a full boil.
- The mixed jamsStrawberries and raspberries are both low in pectin and are being carried by the gooseberry here, which is the point of the combination. Keep the gooseberry share at half or more or the set will suffer.
- With marmaladeThe text most likely means a finished citrus marmalade is combined with the gooseberry rather than made separately alongside, though the wording is ambiguous. If you read it that way, add the marmalade with the sugar and cut the sugar slightly, since the marmalade brings its own.
- SealingThe recipe gives no sealing instruction. Paraffin-and-tumbler sealing, common in older preserving books, is no longer recommended. Ladle into hot sterilized jars, leave a quarter-inch headspace, and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes, or refrigerate and eat within a month.
Gooseberries were a far more familiar fruit to earlier preserving cooks than to cooks today, and more familiar still in Britain, where competitive gooseberry clubs in the north of England had been weighing prize berries since the eighteenth century. Their disappearance from American gardens and markets was not a matter of taste: Ribes species, gooseberries and currants alike, host part of the life cycle of white pine blister rust, and federal and state restrictions on growing them beginning in the 1910s and 1920s cut the fruit out of a generation of kitchens. The high natural pectin and sharp acidity that make gooseberries set so readily are also why old books recommend them, as here, as a partner to strawberries and raspberries, which set poorly on their own.