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White Gooseberry Jelly
Follow recipe for currant jelly.
Fill half the jelly tumbler with the gooseberry jelly and half with currants, raspberry or mint, as suggested in directions for Jelly Making giving a two-color effect.
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This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it borrows the method from the book's currant jelly and adds a layering trick. A few things need filling in before it will work in a modern kitchen.
- The method it points toCurrant-jelly directions of this period generally run: crush the fruit, heat it (with little or no added water) until the juice runs, drain through a jelly bag without squeezing, then boil the juice with roughly its own weight or volume of sugar until it sheets from the spoon. Butterick assumes you have read that page; the gooseberry recipe supplies no quantities of its own.
- White gooseberries"White" here means the pale green-white dessert varieties, not underripe green fruit. Use them slightly underripe rather than fully soft: gooseberries are high in both pectin and acid when just short of ripe, which is exactly what sets a jelly without added pectin.
- Jelly tumblersThese were straight-sided glass tumblers of about 6 to 8 oz, sealed with a disc of melted paraffin. Half-pint canning jars are the modern equivalent, and one quart of strained juice will fill roughly four to five of them.
- Do not use paraffinWax seals are no longer considered safe or reliable for storage; they shrink, crack and admit mould. Process filled jars in a boiling water bath, or treat the jelly as a refrigerator preserve to be used within a few weeks.
- The two-color effectThe hinge of the whole thing is timing. Pour the first jelly, let it set firm and cool completely, then pour the second batch only when it has stopped steaming, or the layers will bleed into each other and you get a muddy band instead of a clean line.
- Mint jelly as the second layerMint jelly of this period was generally an apple-based (sometimes gooseberry-based) jelly tinted green and infused with mint rather than a separate fruit, though this entry does not say which Butterick used. Paired with the white gooseberry it would give a pale green over near-colorless effect; currant or raspberry gives a stronger contrast.
- Testing the setBoil the sweetened juice hard and fast rather than long and slow; the boil is a matter of minutes, but the time varies with the fruit and the size of the batch, so go by the test rather than the clock. Test with a chilled saucer or by watching the drip fall from a spoon in a sheet rather than in drops.
Gooseberries were a far more prominent garden fruit in Britain and North America in the early twentieth century than they are now, grown in dozens of named varieties and prized precisely for the qualities that suit jelly, high acid and high natural pectin, which meant a reliable set at a time when commercial pectin extract was only beginning to reach the market. Cultivation fell away sharply in the United States in the early twentieth century when gooseberries and currants were banned or restricted in many states as hosts of white pine blister rust, a plant disease threatening the timber industry, and the fruit never fully regained its place. The two-color tumbler in this entry belongs to the same impulse as the rest of the Butterick book, which was published by a pattern company: layered jellies can be read as a way of making a shelf of home preserves look deliberate, and of using up small quantities of several juices in one glass.