“We did our marketing after breakfast, and revictualled the boat for three days. George said we ought to take vegetables—that it was unhealthy not to eat vegetables. He said they were easy enough to cook, and that he would see to that; so we got ten pounds of potatoes, a bushel of peas, and a few cabbages. We got a beefsteak pie, a couple of gooseberry tarts, and a leg of mutton from the hotel; and fruit, and cakes, and bread and butter, and jam, and bacon and eggs, and other things we foraged round about the town for.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
Put twelve pounds of the red hairy gooseberries, when ripe and gathered in dry weather, into a preservingpan with a pint of currantjuice, drawn as for jelly; let them boil pretty quick, and beat them with the spoon; when they begin to break, put to them six pounds of pure white Lisbon sugar, and simmer to a jam. It requires long boiling, or will not keep; but is an excellent and reasonable thing for tarts or puffs. Look at it in two or three days, and if the syrup and fruit separate, the whole must be boiled longer. Be careful it does not burn to the bottom.
Sources: The passage is from Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka) Jerome, Three men in a boat, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Rundell, New system of domestic cookery, formed upon principles of of 1806, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — moss cloth, rowboat stamp.