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Gooseberry Jam
This is made in the same way as strawberry jam, with, however, much additional boiling. The fruit should be boiled one hour alone, then the sugar added, and boiled one hour longer, stirring constantly during the last half hour of the cooking.
A cross-reference recipe: the method is borrowed from the strawberry jam entry, and only the boiling times are given here. The proportions and the two-hour cook both need translation.
- ProportionsPreserving of this period generally worked on roughly equal weights of fruit and sugar, so 1 lb sugar to 1 lb hulled fruit is the sensible reading. The original gives no figure here, and the strawberry entry it refers to is not reproduced, so treat any exact ratio as an inference.
- The two hours is the one thing to ignoreGooseberries are among the most pectin-rich and most acidic of temperate fruits, and they set readily. An hour of boiling before the sugar goes in, plus another hour after, will scorch the sugar and cook the set out of the pectin. Fifteen to twenty-five minutes of hard boiling after the sugar dissolves, to 220F on a candy thermometer, is what modern practice calls for.
- Why the original boils so longNineteenth-century preserving generally relied on prolonged evaporation rather than a measured setting point, and cooks commonly judged doneness by how the jam sheeted off a spoon. A high sugar concentration would also have helped the keeping qualities of a preserve in an imperfectly sealed jar.
- Choose the fruit greenUnderripe, firm green gooseberries carry the most pectin and acid; fully ripe dessert varieties set less reliably and give a flatter flavour. Top and tail them before weighing.
- ScorchingThe instruction to stir constantly at the end is the practical heart of the recipe. Sugar at this concentration catches on the pan bottom in seconds; use a wide heavy pan and a flat-edged wooden spoon or heatproof spatula that reaches the corners.
- SealingThe recipe gives no sealing or storage instruction. Whatever the original method, follow current guidance for jam: hot jars, new two-piece lids, and a boiling-water bath for the time your altitude requires, or refrigerate and eat within a few weeks. Paraffin wax seals are no longer recommended.
- YieldNot stated. Two pounds of fruit with two pounds of sugar gives roughly five to six half-pint jars.
Gooseberries were a British obsession long before they were an American one: through the nineteenth century northern English gooseberry clubs held weigh-ins for the heaviest berry, and hundreds of named varieties were in circulation. In American cookbooks of the Butterick era gooseberry jam sits comfortably in the canning chapter because the fruit is tart, firm and rich in pectin, which made it forgiving in a kitchen with no thermometer and no commercial pectin to fall back on. Its later scarcity in the United States is generally traced to the early twentieth-century campaigns against Ribes species as hosts of white pine blister rust, which led to bans and eradication programmes in many states and pushed the gooseberry out of the ordinary household repertoire. That this recipe is written as an afterthought to strawberry jam is itself typical of the period: the compilers expected a cook to learn one preserving method and vary the times.