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Gooseberry Sauce
Pick one pound of green gooseberries, and put them in a saucepan with sufficient water to keep them from burning; when soft mash them, grate in a little nutmeg and sweeten to taste with moist sugar. This sauce may be served with roast pork or goose instead of apple sauce. It may also be served with boiled mackerel. A small piece of butter will make the sauce more rich.
A three-line fruit sauce that depends almost entirely on the fruit being properly unripe. The instructions are complete; the only real decisions are sugar and texture.
- Green gooseberriesThese are hard, sour, underripe berries picked in early summer, not the soft dessert-ripe ones. Sourness is the point, so resist the urge to substitute anything sweet; frozen green gooseberries work well, and a firm tart variety is closer than a ripe red one.
- Top and tail"Pick" here most likely means picking the fruit over: snipping off the dried flower end and the stem from each berry, though the word could equally just mean gathering it. Kitchen scissors are faster than a knife, and the sauce will be mashed anyway, so it need not be immaculate.
- Moist sugarMoist sugar is unrefined or partly refined sugar with molasses still clinging to it, closest today to light brown sugar or demerara. Ordinary granulated sugar works but gives a cleaner, flatter sweetness.
- Sufficient waterTwo or three tablespoons in a heavy pan is enough for a pound of berries; they release plenty of juice as they heat. Too much water gives a thin sauce you then have to boil down.
- Sweeten to tasteExpect somewhere between a quarter and a half cup of sugar per pound, added after the fruit is soft. Green gooseberries vary enormously in acidity.
- TextureMashing with a fork or the back of a spoon leaves skins and seeds, which is traditional. For a smoother sauce with mackerel, push it through a sieve after mashing.
- TimingFifteen to twenty minutes over low heat is usually enough for the berries to burst and collapse. Stir toward the end, as the purée catches quickly.
- YieldA pound of fruit makes roughly a cup and a half of sauce, enough for six to eight servings alongside pork, goose or oily fish.
Gooseberry sauce for mackerel is one of the older fixed pairings in English cookery, attested for centuries, and the French name for the fruit, groseille à maquereau, records the same association independently. The logic is the same as apple with pork: sharp fruit acid cuts rich or oily flesh, and before lemons were cheap and year-round, the acid came from whatever was in the hedgerow or kitchen garden. Green gooseberries arrive in early summer, which is also mackerel season, so the pairing was as much a matter of the calendar as of taste. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's book, drawn from the Waldorf's kitchens around the turn of the twentieth century, shows how much plain English domestic cookery still sat behind the hotel's French-leaning menus — this is a farmhouse sauce written down by the maître d'hôtel of New York's grandest hotel.