Green Gooseberries for Tarts
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the bottles
Fill clean, dry, wide-necked bottles with gooseberries before they reach full growth.
Cork the bottles lightly.
Wrap a little hay around each bottle.
Set the bottles upright in a pot of cold water.
Scald and seal
Gradually bring the water to a boil.
Simmer the fruit until it appears shrunken and perfectly scalded.
Remove the bottles.
Fill them with the contents of one or two bottles, being careful not to break the fruit.
Pour scalding water into the bottles to cover the gooseberries completely.
Cork the bottles well.
Seal the necks with melted rosin.
Store and use
Store in a cool place.
When ready to use, pour off most of the water.
Add sugar as for fresh fruit.
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
- The fruit itself, which is preserved whole and later sweetened for tarts.
- Sugar
- Added at the end to sweeten the fruit, as it would be for fresh gooseberries.
The step that matters
Simmer the fruit until it appears shrunken and perfectly scalded. Heating the fruit gently enough to scald it, without boiling it apart, softens the tissue and drives out air so the fruit stays whole and keeps in the sealed bottle.
“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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