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Preserved Gooseberries
Put into a preserving-pan five pounds of gooseberries with one pound of sugar dusted over them and set the pan on the fire; when the juice commences to come out take off the pan. Repeat this process for two days more, then take the gooseberries out of the syrup, drain them on sieves and place them to dry either before the fire or in the sun, the latter for preference. After taking out of the pan, they may be dipped in fine sugar and packed away in boxes.
This is not a jam but a candied fruit — gooseberries drawn slowly with sugar over three days, then dried and dusted. The whole point is to keep the berries whole, which means restraint at the stove.
- The hinge: never let it boilTake the pan off the heat as soon as juice begins to run from the fruit. Gooseberries burst readily once the syrup simmers, and burst fruit gives you jam rather than whole preserved berries.
- What the three days are doingEach brief heating plus a long rest pulls water out of the berries osmotically and lets syrup move in. There is no shortcut: cooking it all at once in one session gives you soft, wrinkled fruit.
- Preserving-panA wide, shallow pan; historically brass or copper. Any wide heavy-bottomed pan works, but avoid aluminium and untinned cast iron, which can react with the fruit acid and dull the colour.
- Choose the fruit greenUse firm, slightly underripe gooseberries — the hard green dessert sort rather than soft ripe red ones. Top and tail them, and prick each once with a needle so the skins do not burst in the pan.
- Sugar quantityOne pound of sugar to five pounds of fruit sounds thin. It reads as a dusting that draws out the berries' own juice to make the syrup, though 'repeat this process' may mean another pound dusted on each of the three days. Either way, expect a light syrup rather than a heavy candying bath.
- Drying"Before the fire" means low, steady, dry warmth; a dehydrator on a low setting, or an oven at its lowest with the door propped, will do the same over a number of hours. Sun-drying takes several days and needs cover from insects and dew each night.
- Keep the syrupThe drained syrup is intensely gooseberry-flavoured and worth bottling for puddings, soda water or basting. The recipe itself says nothing about what becomes of it.
- StorageCandied fruit at this sugar level is not shelf-stable in the way jam is. The pieces must be dry to the touch before boxing, and even then they keep best cool, dark and airtight; check for mould and refrigerate or freeze for long keeping.
- YieldFive pounds of fresh berries will finish at a fraction of that weight once drained and dried; how much depends on how far you dry them and how much syrup they take up.
Drying fruit in its own sugar is one of the oldest sweetmeat techniques in European cookery, predating jam-making proper: confectioners in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries built whole trades on "wet" and "dry" suckets, the dry ones being exactly this — fruit drawn in syrup, drained and sanded with sugar. Gooseberries were a British and northern European fixation, grown obsessively by nineteenth-century amateur societies who competed on berry size, and they arrive in an American hotel kitchen largely through that inheritance.