Gooseberries, Dried, for Winter Dessert
Ingredients
Directions
Make the syrup
Cut the tops off the gooseberries, leaving the stalks intact.
Boil the sugar and water together until the syrup thickens.
Simmer and rest
Simmer the gooseberries in the syrup for 10–15 minutes.
Pour the gooseberries and syrup into a container.
Let the mixture sit overnight.
Boil and dry
Boil the gooseberries in the syrup again for 10 minutes.
Drain the syrup.
Spread the gooseberries on a sieve to dry before a fire.
Dip the gooseberries in powdered sugar as you remove them from the syrup.
Store the dried gooseberries between sheets of paper in tin boxes.
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
- Provide the fruit that is concentrated and preserved as the main product.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the fruit and, in a thick syrup, draws out water to preserve it.
The step that matters
Simmering in the syrup over repeated days. Gooseberries must be cooked gently and rested in syrup so sugar slowly replaces their water. Boiling too hard can break the skins and make the fruit collapse rather than stay whole.
“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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