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Dessert

Preserved Fruits

A preserved fruit mixture of gooseberries and currants soaked, blanched, and cooked in clarified sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

Preserved Fruits

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gooseberries

  1. Cut the gooseberries through the eye down to the stem and remove the seeds.

  2. String the gooseberries on white thread, tying a knot at each end.

  3. Dissolve ½ cup of coarse sea salt in a pan of clean cold water and soak the gooseberries overnight.

  4. Drain and blanch the gooseberries in clean water until soft.

  5. Drain the gooseberries in a sieve.

Prepare the currants

  1. Remove the pips from the currants with a sharp quill, being careful not to damage the fruit.

  2. Tie five or six bunches of currants together by their stalks or on a piece of slit wood.

Make the syrup and preserve

  1. Boil 2.5 to 3 pounds of clarified sugar with enough water to allow the currants to float until it reaches the 'Large Pearl' stage.

  2. Add the currants to the boiling sugar and boil five or six times, skimming off the scum.

  3. Let the mixture settle for a few minutes before boiling again the next day.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Clarified sugar
Forms the syrup that sweetens the fruit and preserves it by drawing out water.
Coarse sea salt
Brine that firms the gooseberries and draws out moisture before cooking.
Gooseberries
Main fruit; soaking and blanching soften them so they absorb the syrup.
Currants
Main fruit that is boiled in the syrup to become preserved and translucent.

The step that matters

Boiling to the Large Pearl stage. Sugar syrup must reach the correct concentration to preserve the fruit. Too little boiling leaves the syrup thin and the fruit prone to spoiling, while overcooking makes it hard and sticky.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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