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Dessert

Red Gooseberry Jam

A jam made from red gooseberries, sugar, currant juice, and water, cooked slowly until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and red currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,156 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Red Gooseberry Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the jam

  1. In a pan, layer the gooseberries with ¾ pound of poured sugar.

  2. Add 1 pint of red currant juice and 1 pound of sugar.

  3. Pour in ½ cup of water for every 2 pounds of sugar.

  4. Place the pan on a very low heat until the juice runs from the berries and the sugar melts.

Cook

  1. Boil slowly for at least 30 minutes, or longer, until the skins are tender and sweet.

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. Sugar + red curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Red gooseberries
Provide the fruit body and tart flavour, with skins that soften during slow boiling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the jam set and preserve the fruit.
Red currant juice
Adds liquid and extra pectin and acidity to help the jam set.

The step that matters

Boil slowly until the skins are tender. Gooseberry skins are tough and need long, gentle simmering to soften fully. Boiling too hard can scorch the sugar or break down the fruit unevenly, so keep the heat low and steady.

“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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