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Compote of Green Gooseberries
Take the gooseberries, cut each one at the side so as to squeeze out the seeds, and scald the jackets in hot water until they rise to the top. Take them out and put them in salted cold water to make them green. Place them in clarified syrup, and simmer, letting them remain for some time in this syrup to sweeten them well. When they have remained long enough, take them out, and arrange in the compote-dish. Let the syrup continue to boil gently until thick. Pour it over the gooseberries, and serve.
A late-Victorian hotel treatment of underripe gooseberries: seeded, blanched, then candied slowly in syrup until they are translucent. The one thing that decides success is heat control — the syrup must never do more than shiver while the fruit is in it, or the jackets burst and you have jam.
- "Green" gooseberriesThese are hard, tart, underripe fruit picked in late spring, not a green-skinned dessert variety. If only ripe berries are available the skins are too soft to hold their shape through the syrup.
- SeedingA shallow slit down one side and gentle pressure will push out the seeds and pulp. Work over a bowl if you want to save the pulp for a fool; note that it carries the seeds the recipe is at pains to remove.
- ScaldingWater just off the boil, and only until the empty jackets rise to the top, which happens quickly. Longer and they collapse.
- "To make them green"The cold salted water is meant to set the colour and firm the skins. Nineteenth-century kitchens sometimes greened fruit in copper pans instead, a practice condemned at the time as poisonous — do not use unlined copper here.
- Clarified syrupIn period kitchens this meant a sugar syrup boiled and skimmed, sometimes with egg white whisked in to carry off scum. A syrup of roughly two parts sugar to one part water, boiled and skimmed, gives a similar result; modern refined sugar needs no egg white.
- Simmering and steepingBring the syrup to a bare simmer and slide in the jackets, keeping it at the barest movement. "Some time" is not specified; a long, gentle steep in the warm syrup lets the sugar penetrate without boiling the fruit to pieces.
- Reducing the syrupAfter lifting the fruit out, boil the syrup until it thickens and coats a spoon, as the recipe directs; carried much further it will set stiff around the berries.
- Yield and servingServe at room temperature or lightly chilled, on their own or with a plain cream, and expect a pronounced tartness under the sugar.
Gooseberries were a serious English and northern European fruit long before they were a curiosity, and the practice of "greening" them — blanching and then shocking underripe fruit to fix its colour before candying — appears in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century confectionery manuals. It was sometimes done in a copper preserving pan, whose reaction with the fruit acid produced a brilliant green that some writers of the period recommended and that food-safety reformers condemned as verdigris poisoning; the salted cold water here is the safer, if less vivid, alternative. That the recipe sits in the Waldorf's kitchen notes at all is a reminder of how much fruit work a large American hotel did in-house at the end of the century, and how thoroughly its dessert repertoire was still French in outline — compote meaning fruit cooked whole in syrup, served in a footed dish made for the purpose.