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To Dry Ripe Gooseberries with Sugar

This recipe dries ripe gooseberries in a sugar syrup until clear and tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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To Dry Ripe Gooseberries with Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gooseberries

  1. Cut the tops off the gooseberries, leaving the stalks intact.

  2. Remove the seeds from the gooseberries as you would for unripe ones.

Cook in syrup

  1. In a saucepan, combine the sugar and water, and boil until the syrup thickens.

  2. Add the gooseberries to the syrup and boil until they are clear and tender.

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
Form the fruit itself, turning tender and translucent as they cook in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, at high concentration in syrup, helps preserve it by drawing out water.

The step that matters

Boil the gooseberries until clear and tender. Cooking in syrup softens the fruit and lets sugar replace its water, so it turns clear. Stopping too early leaves the fruit firm and cloudy, while boiling too long can break the skins and collapse the berries.

“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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