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To keep gooseberries
Put an ounce of roche alum beat very fine, into a large pan of boiling hard water; place a few gooseberries at the bottom of a hair sieve, and hold them in the water till they turn white. Then take out the sieve, and spread the gooseberries between two cloths; put more into the sieve, then repeat it till they are all done. Put the water into a glazed pot until the next day, then put the gooseberries onto wide mouthed bottles, pick out all the cracked and broken ones, pour the water clear out of the pot, and fill the bottles with it, cork them loosely and let them stand a fortnight. If they rise to the corks, take them out and let them stand two or three days uncorked, then cork them close again
This is a pre-canning method of holding green gooseberries for winter tarts, and it depends on alum and cold water rather than on heat. It cannot be made safely today, but the vocabulary is worth decoding.
- Why this failsThe berries get only a brief dip in the hot alum water, and the bottles themselves are never heat-processed: the fruit is packed cold into water that has stood overnight, and a loose cork is not a seal. The filled bottles then stand at room temperature for weeks.
- The bottles rising to the corkIf the contents push up at the corks, the likeliest cause is gas from fermentation. The instruction to uncork, vent for a few days and then re-cork manages that rather than preventing it. Modern practice discards anything that gasses in storage.
- Roche alumRoche or rock alum is potassium aluminium sulphate, the same compound once sold in small amounts as a pickle firming agent. The recipe puts an ounce into an unspecified 'large pan' of water, so the strength cannot be calculated, but it is likely well above modern pickling levels, and alum in quantity is a gastric irritant.
- Alum is not a preservativeAluminium ions crosslink pectin, which is the usual explanation for the berries firming up. It is not a reliable preservative at these levels, so firm, whitened fruit gives a false impression of having been processed.
- Hair sieveA sieve bottomed with woven horsehair, the standard fine strainer before wire mesh. Here it is simply a dipping basket for lowering small batches of fruit into boiling water.
- Hard water, glazed pot, fortnight'Boiling hard water' may mean hard water, whose dissolved calcium also helps firm pectin, or simply water at a hard boil; the recipe does not say. A glazed pot is glazed earthenware; period lead glazes are a hazard in their own right. A fortnight is two weeks.
- If you want bottled gooseberriesUse a current tested recipe for water-bath canning of gooseberries, with weighed sugar, measured headspace and a timed process.
Green gooseberries had a short season and an enormous demand behind them, since the unripe fruit was the standard filling for spring tarts and the classic sauce for mackerel, and English cooks tried hard to stretch it into the rest of the year. Before Nicolas Appert's heat-processing work at the start of the nineteenth century filtered into domestic kitchens, bottling was done in a variety of ways, and an additive to keep the fruit firm was one common resort, which is why alum turns up in so many eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century receipts for preserved fruit and pickles alike. The whitening the recipe watches for was presumably taken as the sign that the fruit had set firm, and it was prized because a bottled gooseberry that had gone soft was useless for a tart.