To Bottle Gooseberries
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Pick green gooseberries.
Boil hard water in a large pan and add the roche alum.
Place a few gooseberries in a fine sieve and hold them in the boiling water until they turn white.
Remove the sieve and spread the gooseberries to cool.
Repeat until all gooseberries are blanched.
Pickle
Transfer the water into a glazed pot and let it sit overnight.
Place the gooseberries into wide-mouthed bottles, discarding any cracked ones.
Pour the water from the pot into the bottles, filling them up.
Cork the bottles loosely and let them stand for two weeks.
If the gooseberries rise to the corks, uncork them for two to three days, then cork tightly.
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
What each ingredient does
- Gooseberries
- Are the fruit being preserved; blanching firms their skins so they hold shape in the brine.
- Roche alum
- Firms the fruit's tissue so the gooseberries stay crisp rather than going soft in the pickle.
- Spring water
- Forms the liquid that carries the alum and covers the fruit during pickling.
The step that matters
Blanching in alum water. Holding the gooseberries in boiling water only until they turn white is the point to watch. Overcooking softens the fruit and breaks down the pectin that helps it keep its shape, so the pickle turns mushy.
“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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