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Dessert

Sun Preserved Gooseberries

Sun-preserved gooseberries are gooseberries sweetened and dried in the sun.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Sun Preserved Gooseberries

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fruit

  1. In a quart pan, combine 6 pounds of gooseberries and 2 pounds of sugar.

  2. Heat the pan on the fire, stirring carefully until the juice begins to release.

  3. Remove the pan from heat and repeat this process for two more days.

  4. On the second and third days, add 1 pound of sugar each day.

Dry the fruit

  1. After the final day, remove the gooseberries from the syrup.

  2. Place the gooseberries on platters and boil the syrup until thick.

  3. Pour the thick syrup over the fruit and let them dry in the sun.

  4. Seal the preserved gooseberries after two days.

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

What each ingredient does

Gooseberries
Provide the fruit that softens in syrup and dries into a chewy, concentrated texture.
Sugar
Draws water out of the fruit and builds a thick syrup that preserves it and adds sweetness.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup until thick. Sugar concentration is what preserves the fruit. Syrup that is not boiled down enough leaves too much water, so the gooseberries can spoil instead of drying safely.

“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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