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Spiced Gooseberries
Leave the stem and blossom on ripe gooseberries, wash clean ; make a syrup of three pints sugar to one of vinegar, skim, if necessary, add berries and boil down till thick, adding more sugar if needed; when almost done, spice with cinnamon and cloves; boil as thick as apple butter.
A sweet pickle in the old sense: fruit cooked down in a sugar-vinegar syrup until it is nearly a conserve, meant to be spooned out beside cold meat. The proportions are given for the syrup only, which leaves the cook to judge the fruit.
- The hinge: cook it down far enough"boil as thick as apple butter" is the whole instruction. The mixture should mound on a spoon and a track drawn through it on a cold plate should hold; some cooks use about 220F as a rough proxy, though apple-butter thickness is judged by eye rather than by thermometer. Under-reduced, the syrup stays thin and the keeping quality suffers.
- How much fruitThe original never says, which is genuinely ambiguous. Three pints sugar to one pint vinegar is a lot of syrup; 3 to 4 lb of berries is a reasonable reading, added until the fruit is just covered.
- Pints of sugarSugar was measured by volume in this book. Three pints is about 6 cups, near 2 1/2 lb; one pint of vinegar is 2 cups. Use a 5 percent cider or white wine vinegar rather than anything labelled cleaning strength.
- Stem and blossomThe recipe leaves the stem and dried blossom end on; one likely reason is that the berries hold together better than when topped and tailed, though the text gives no reason. If that texture in the finished pickle bothers you, top and tail them and accept a softer result.
- Spice late, and wholeSpice late -- The recipe adds spice only when the fruit is almost done; it does not say whether whole or ground. Cinnamon sticks and whole cloves in the last few minutes give the cleanest flavour, and roughly a dozen cloves and two sticks would suit this quantity.
- Pan and skimmingUse a wide, heavy, non-reactive pan — stainless or enamelled. Vinegar will pick up metallic flavours from bare cast iron or unlined copper. Skim the syrup before the fruit goes in, as directed, and stir often near the end, when the sugar catches easily.
- Keeping itNo sealing or sterilising is described, which is common in recipes of this kind. Treat it as a refrigerator preserve, kept covered and eaten within a few weeks, or follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure for high-acid fruit pickles.
- Yield and servingYield cannot be pinned down, since the fruit quantity is unspecified; expect several half-pint jars. It is a condiment, not a jam: a spoonful with roast pork, ham, cold fowl or a sharp cheese.
Sweet pickles — fruit simmered in spiced sugar and vinegar — filled whole chapters of American cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century, when a table of cold meats was expected to come with something sharp and sweet beside it, and peaches, pears, crabapples, plums and currants all got the same cinnamon-and-clove treatment. Gooseberries belonged to that world more securely than they do to ours: they were a standard kitchen-garden bush in Britain and the northern United States, prolific, intensely acid, and cheap enough to preserve in quantity. Their near-disappearance from American cooking came later, when Ribes bushes were found to host white pine blister rust and cultivation was restricted in many states through much of the twentieth century, a ban only gradually relaxed. That the recipe leaves the stem and blossom attached and measures sugar in pints is a fair sign of its date: fruit came in from the garden by the basketful, and no one expected the cook to weigh it.