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Gooseberry Jam
Pick and carefully remove with a needle seeds of twenty-five pounds ripe, sound, fresh gooseberries, plunge in plenty boiling water with a half tablespoon salt and let boil for five minutes. Thoroughly drain on sieve, disgorge in cold water for two hours and drain again on a sieve. Place sixteen pounds granulated sugar in a copper basin with two quarts water and a tablespoon vanilla essence. Set basin on brisk fire and cook for ten minutes, drop in berries, lightly mix and boil for two minutes, transfer to an earthen basin and let stand for six hours. Pour syrup (only) into basin, boil briskly for five minutes, drop in goose-berries, boil for two minutes, then re-pour whole into the basin and let thoroughly cool. Re-pour syrup (only) into the other basin and boil until it begins to bubble, drop in gooseberries, lightly mix and remove to table. Dip some jelly glasses in hot water for a few minutes, take out and wipe, fill up with jam and let thoroughly cool. Place a piece of wax paper lightly dipped in brandy over each glass, tightly cover, lay in cool place, and the jam is ready for use.
A grand-scale confiture in the French manner, written for a hotel kitchen with copper preserving pans and a brigade to do the seeding. It scales down cleanly, but the multi-day syrup method is the point and should not be collapsed into a single boil.
- Scale it down firstTwenty-five pounds of fruit to sixteen pounds of sugar is roughly a 3:2 ratio by weight. Two pounds of gooseberries to 1 lb 4 oz sugar, with about 10 tablespoons water and a scant quarter teaspoon of vanilla, keeps the proportions and fits a domestic pan.
- The seeding is optional labourRemoving seeds with a needle from each berry appears in period recipes for luxury preserves and is what separates this from ordinary jam. Skipping it costs you nothing but texture; the seeds are edible and the set may be firmer, since gooseberry pectin is concentrated in the skins and around the seeds.
- "Disgorge in cold water"Simply soak. The blanch-and-soak appears to be meant to firm the skins so the berries hold their shape through repeated contact with boiling syrup -- boiled in it twice, added a third time off the fire -- rather than collapsing into pulp.
- Copper basinAn unlined copper preserving pan conducts fast and evenly and was the professional standard. Any wide, heavy, non-reactive pan works; avoid unlined copper if the fruit will sit in it, as gooseberries are acidic enough to leach metal. Do not let the fruit stand in the cooking pan for hours o to an earthen bowl.
- The three-boil methodRepeatedly boiling the syrup alone and returning the fruit to it draws sugar into the berries gradually without cooking them to mush. It is slow candying, not jam-making, and the six-hour stand and the long cooling are working time, not idleness.
- "Boil until it begins to bubble" is vagueBy the third boil the syrup should be at about 220-222F (104-105C), the setting point for jam. Use a thermometer rather than guessing; the original assumes a cook who could read syrup by eye.
- Vanilla essenceA tablespoon in twenty-five pounds of fruit is a background note, not a flavour. Modern extract may well be stronger than the essence intended here, so err low.
- Sealing and storageThe brandy-dipped wax paper was a mould inhibitor, not a seal. For anything you intend to keep at room temperature, use current preserving practice: sterilised jars, two-piece lids, and a boiling-water bath. Otherwise refrigerate and use within a couple of months.
- YieldThe full recipe makes roughly forty pounds of finished jam. The scaled-down version above gives about four half-pint jars.
Gooseberries were a serious fruit in nineteenth-century Britain and northern France, with competitive growers' clubs in Lancashire and Cheshire showing berries bred for size, and cooks distinguishing sharply between green fruit for sauce and ripe fruit for preserves. The needle-seeding here belongs to a specific luxury tradition: the confituriers of Bar-le-Duc in Lorraine had long been known for currant jam in which each berry was emptied of its seeds through a goose quill, the whole fruit left intact and suspended in clear syrup, and the technique carried over to other soft fruit in professional kitchens. The staged boiling — syrup reduced alone, fruit returned briefly, the whole left to rest — is candying logic applied to jam, and it survives in French confiture practice today. The scale of this version, twenty-five pounds at a time, marks it as a restaurant or large-household recipe from an era when a kitchen put up preserves by the season rather than by the jar.