Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Gooseberry Jelly
Gooseberry Jelly
Take the required quantity of ripe gooseberries, wipe them and put them in a preserving-pan with a little water to keep them from burning, and let them stew at the side of the fire until tender; then mash them, strain the juice through a sieve and for each pound of it add three-quarters of a pound of crushed loaf sugar. Put it into a stewpan, reduce until it will drop from the spoon in lumps, and turn into jars; tie these over tightly, and keep them in a dry place until wanted.
A plain nineteenth-century jelly formula that assumes you know what a set looks like. The proportions are sound; only the sealing and the doneness test need updating.
- The hinge: judge the set by temperature"Drop from the spoon in lumps" means the sheeting stage. A thermometer reading of 220F (104C) at sea level, or a spoonful wrinkling on a chilled saucer, is the reliable version of the same test. Overcooking past this point gives a stiff, caramel-tinged jelly.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined cane sugar sold in cones and broken up as needed; "crushed" simply means smashed to a coarse powder. Ordinary granulated sugar is a direct substitute, weight for weight.
- The ratio is by weight of juiceThree-quarters of a pound of sugar to each pound of strained juice, so roughly 12 oz sugar to a scant 2 cups. Weigh the juice rather than measuring by volume; the recipe's arithmetic depends on it.
- Use fruit slightly under-ripeGooseberries are exceptionally high in both pectin and acid, which is why this recipe needs no lemon and no added pectin. Fully ripe berries have lost some of both, so a proportion of firm, green-tinged fruit gives a firmer set.
- "At the side of the fire"The cool edge of a range top, meaning a bare simmer. On a modern burner, low heat with a splash of water — about half a cup to two pounds of fruit — until the skins burst and collapse, usually 15 to 20 minutes.
- StrainingA sieve as directed will give a cloudy jelly, since mashing pushes pulp through. For a clear one, let the cooked fruit drip through a scalded jelly bag or double muslin without pressing, which takes several hours.
- SealingTying jars over with paper or cloth was the standard nineteenth-century closure and relies on the sugar and a cool dry larder to hold off mould. Current practice is a boiling-water bath in sterilised jars with two-piece lids, or simply keeping the jelly in the refrigerator and using it within a couple of months.
- YieldThe original gives none because it scales freely. Two pounds of gooseberries will give something in the region of a pint of juice and a couple of half-pint jars, though the figure swings with how much water is added and how far the jelly is reduced.
Gooseberries were a British and Northern European obsession long before they were an American one — eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England had gooseberry clubs and competitive shows for the largest berry — and the fruit's high natural pectin made it one of the first reliable jelly fruits, worked out generations before pectin itself was identified. In American cookbooks the berry appears steadily through the 1800s, then thins out sharply: white pine blister rust, for which currants and gooseberries are an alternate host, brought federal and state restrictions on growing Ribes from around 1912, and the fruit largely disappeared from commercial markets. Oscar Tschirky's book, compiled at the Waldorf around the turn of the century, catches it just before that decline.