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Preserve

Gooseberries Preserved

Preserved gooseberries are gooseberries scalded and bottled with alum water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Gooseberries Preserved

Ingredients

Directions

Scald the fruit

  1. Boil a kettle of water and dissolve enough roche alum to slightly thicken the water.

  2. Place gooseberries in a large sieve without stacking them.

  3. Hold the sieve in the boiling water until the gooseberries look scalded on the outside.

  4. Gently transfer the gooseberries to a cloth and cover them with another cloth while you scald the remaining fruit.

Bottle and seal

  1. The next day, remove any bad or broken gooseberries and bottle the good ones.

  2. Fill the bottles with the alum water used for scalding.

  3. Seal the bottles tightly to preserve the gooseberries.

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
The fruit being preserved; its skin and flesh are what the scalding and alum treatment affect.
Roche alum
Firms the fruit's skin and tissue so the gooseberries hold their shape during scalding and storage.

The step that matters

Scalding the gooseberries. Hold the fruit in the boiling alum water only until the outside looks scalded. Brief heat firms the skin, while longer heating softens the flesh and splits 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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