The last in a quartet of gooseberry posts – I promise I will change the subject next post.
In my honest, humble opinion this is the best
gooseberry dessert recipe. It’s old-fashioned and simple to make – gooseberries
are baked with a little brown sugar and a knob or two of butter, all covered in
cake sponge. The berries are still very sharp and are perfectly balanced with
the warm, sweet sponge. This is much more superior to the better-known Eve’s
pudding – stewed cooking apples covered in sponge cake. I suspect this would work
excellently with blackcurrants.
This recipe crops up in my traditional English or British cookery books, but I first heard of it from Jane Grigson (as I have many dishes) in her book English Food.
For the pudding, you can make any amount of topping, it’s
dependent upon whether you like a thin or thick layer of sponge and the
dimensions of your baking dish. I used a soufflé dish of diameter around 7
inches/18 centimetres. I think this is a good amount for this size, and for
most family-sized dishes.
The sponge is made using the all-in-one method, so make sure
your butter is extremely soft to ensure a light topping.
Scatter the sugar and dot the butter on the bottom of your
baking dish and cover with the gooseberries; you are aiming for a generous
single layer of them.
Place the butter, flour, caster sugar and eggs in a bowl and
beat together with an electric mixer until the mixture is smooth and
well-combined. Using a large spoon or spatula, add the cake batter in big
spoonfuls over the gooseberries and level it, you don’t have to be very neat
here, the baking batter will flatted itself out.
Place in the oven and bake for around an hour until the top
is a deep golden-brown colour.
Serve immediately with custard or lightly-whipped cream sweetened with a little icing sugar.
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I was kindly given part of a large crop of gooseberries by my friends Kit and Ellie, their two bushes have been prolific this year. Earlier in the summer, I used some of their underripe berries to make a sauce to accompany mackerel, but now they were large and quite sweet.
I made the lion’s share of them into gooseberry jam and
thought I would give you a recipe, as it is so easy to make, and you are
unlikely to find it in the shops. If you don’t know of any gooseberry bushes,
try a greengrocer – I have spotted them in quite a few shops this year.
The great thing about gooseberry jam is that the
gooseberries change in colour, adopting an appetising warm pinkish hue with the
intense heat of jam-making. This change is apparently due to the anthocyanins
in the gooseberries interacting with metal ions leached from the cooking vessel
itself.
Gooseberries are not as juicy as their red, white and blackcurrant relatives so they need a bit of extra added water to help dissolve the sugar. Gooseberries are high in pectin, especially when young, so there should be enough to set the jam. However, if they are late season and ripe, you might want to replace a small proportion of the sugar with jam sugar, which contains pectin, to give them a helping hand.
The jam I made is simple: gooseberries, sugar and water, but
if you have any of the extras in the ingredients list below, feel free to add
them if you like.
The jam makes a great roly-poly or Victoria sponge filling.
The quantities below makes around 1 litre of jam, and it is
easy to scale up or down depending upon the amount of gooseberries you have to
hand.
1 kg gooseberries, washed, topped and tailed
1 kg granulated sugar (or 800 g granulated and 200 g jam
sugar, if the gooseberries are ripe
500 ml water
Optional extras: A dozen elderflower heads wrapped in
muslin, a good bunch of sweet cicely tied with twine or replace 250 ml of the
water with Muscat wine.
Before you start, place a saucer in the freezer.
Place all the ingredients in a large, heavy based saucepan on a medium heat.
Stir occasionally and when all of the sugar has dissolved, turn the heat up to bring the gooseberries to a really good boil. After around 15 minutes – by now they should have a pinkish tinge about them – test to see if you have got a set. Either take the jam’s temperature with a temperature probe and see if it is 105°C, or take a teaspoon of the mixture and place a few drops on your very cold saucer you had stored in the fridge, let it cool for a minute and see if the drops wrinkle when you push them with a finger.
You can use a candy thermometer instead of a probe, but I
find them imprecise. However, if you have a trusty one, by all means slot it
down the inside of jam before you start to boil it.
Leave the jam to cool for 15 minutes and skim any scum with
a large spoon or ladle.
Have some sterilised jars ready and ladle in the jam. A jam
funnel is helpful here. Alternatively, pour the jam into a Pyrex or stainless-steel
jug rinsed out with scalding water and carefully fill your jars. Seal when
still very hot.
I have written at length about setting points and sterilisation, so if you are unsure, have a look at this post here for a walk-through.
Last post I wrote about the delicious gooseberry. Since I wrote it, I have seen them in quite a few shops, including Morrison’s, so I am feeling good about the gooseberry’s culinary future.
You’d think after all these years, I’d be better at taking photographs!
It is important to remember that gooseberries can be served
with meat and fish in rather the same way as tart Bramley apples are: oily fish
such as mackerel is the classic pairing, but I have found recipes that match it
with chicken, goose, pork and mutton or lamb. Sauces and stuffings are made
with the small new tart berries, with just a little sugar. The simplest sauce
being made from halved berries, chopped mint and sugar. The ingredients are
mixed, covered and left to macerate for several hours. Delicious with barbequed
mackerel or herring, and the fact it isn’t cooked means the gooseberries retain
their vibrant green colour.
I mentioned that in France it is known as the mackerel
currant, because it is only ever really served with the oily fish, and even then,
it’s considered particular only to Normandy. It did start life as an English
dish, but as there was much communication between England and Normandy during
the mediaeval period, it’s no surprise that they picked up some tips from the
English during centuries of toing and froing.
I’ve taken elements from three different recipes to come up with mine: Jane Grigson’s English Food (1992), Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families (1847) and Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book (1604). Talent borrows, genius steals and all that. Many of the ingredients are optional, so if you want a cleaner tasting sauce, omit the cream and maybe the butter too. If you are interested, there’s also a great recipe for a gooseberry stuffing for mackerel on my other blog.
It’s a delicious combination – simply grilled mackerel and
the tart sauce, and maybe a green salad on the side. It’s telling you that
summer is here! This pairing is largely forgotten now, but look in some older British
cookery books and you’ll see it crop up again and again.
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Young, green, small gooseberries are required for recipes
that are served with savoury food – the later, large sweet ones are best used
in desserts (recipes for those coming soon).
250 g gooseberries, topped and tailed
50 ml water
50 ml white wine, or a dash of cider vinegar
50 g sugar, or to taste
good pinch of ground ginger
salt and pepper
a knob of butter (optional)
2 to 3 tbs double cream (optional)
Put the gooseberries, water, wine or vinegar and sugar in a saucepan and cook until the gooseberries go pale in colour and start to become very soft, crushing them against the side of your pan with a wooden spoon. Season with salt and pepper.
If you want a very smooth sauce with no seeds or pulp, whizz
the whole thing in a blender and pass through a sieve. I like to leave mine
with some texture, but it’s up to you. If you did pass it through a sieve put
it in a clean pan and put it over a medium heat.
Smooth or pulpy, beat in your butter with whisk or spoon
until it becomes glossy, then add the cream.
Add more sugar if you like – remember it isn’t supposed to
be sweet like apple sauce.
Serve alongside grilled or fried mackerel, but also pork,
chicken or goose.
‘Country life has its advantages’, he used to say, ‘You
sit on the veranda drinking tea and your ducklings swim on the pond, and
everything smells good…and there are gooseberries.’
Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries,
1898
The humble gooseberry is not the first of the British summer
fruits that springs to mind, but it is the first of the season, and I think it should
be celebrated just as much as the strawberry or blackcurrant.
It’s quite difficult to find gooseberries in the shops these
days – even good greengrocers don’t seem to sell them, which is odd, because they
keep better than any of our other soft fruits. I suppose one of the reasons for
its unpopularity is that they are usually sold when vibrant green, looking lovely
and fresh but tasting very sour and astringent. In this form they need to be
cooked and sweetened with sugar. Its other disadvantage is that it usually has
to be cooked, no competition amongst the huge variety of exciting dessert fruits
available. It’s a crying shame. Gooseberry season starts in June, but you have
to wait until July for them to ripen into dessert fruit. Patience is a virtue,
after all.
The gooseberry is usually a fruit more suitable for cooking, needing considerable sweetening for palatability unless a savoury accompaniment for meat or fish.
Laura Mason &
Catherine Brown, The Taste of Britain
The gooseberry is one of 150 species of the Ribes
genus, which also includes the smaller and daintier black, red and whitecurrants.
They can be found growing wild in patches of scrub all over Britain, so keep an
eye out wherever you see such areas on walks, there may be a hidden gooseberry
plant (I have my own a secret patch). Gooseberry shrubs are typically three for
four feet high, and as any gooseberry forager knows, somewhat spikey.
Gooseberry colour plate from the Oxford Book of Food Plants
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There are many cultivated varieties including two hybrids;
red and white gooseberry varieties have been crossed with red and whitecurrants
respectively. The hybrids make excellent dessert fruit, helpfully indicting
ripeness when they’ve achieved a good ruby or white colour.
Though looked over now, gooseberries were extremely popular and
have been cultivated in Britain since al least the Fifteenth Century. They were
important because they were the first soft fruit of the summer, cropping well
as far north as the Shetland and Orkney Islands. In the Midlands and Northern
England they were revered, a tradition of competitive growing quickly developing.
There was a single aim in these competitions: to grow the heaviest berry. These
clubs were widespread and at one point there was 170 growing clubs, a handful
still exist today in Yorkshire and Cheshire. To achieve heavy berries, by the
way, you must strip your shrub of berries as soon as they appear, leaving
behind a dozen so that the plant can put all its energy into growing just a few
fruits.
A gooseberry shrub in the rain
Gooseberries are also known colloquially as feabes, feaberries,
carberries and wineberries – the latter name coming from the fact
they make excellent wine.
Aside from some parts of northern Europe, gooseberries haven’t
really travelled much further than Britain from a culinary point of view.
According to Jane Grigson, the French ‘have no name for them distinct from that
of redcurrants’. This does seem to be the case; the French word for redcurrant
is grosielle and when gooseberries are called for, they are called grosielle
à
maquereaux – the mackerel redcurrant.
Although sometimes served with goose, it is not the origin
of the gooseberry’s name as you might assume. It comes from the Old Norman/Middle
English groses or grosier, the old word for – wait for it – grosielle,
the French for redcurrant, so in effect we called gooseberries redcurrantberries!
All of these words come from the Frankish root krûsil
which means ‘crisp berry’, and the gooseberry certainly is that.
Yellow and red are dessert fruit, let them lie on the
hottest sunshine till warm through before serving – it brings out the sweetness
and flavours.
Dorothy Hartley, Food
in England
Preparing and Cooking Gooseberries
Whether you are picking them or buying them, you need to know
how ripe your gooseberries are. This important because small, vivid green
gooseberries are best for accompanying savoury dishes, and large riper ones are
best made into puddings. I remember as a child, dipping raw, tart gooseberries
straight into the sugar bowl. I expect the Sugar Police would have something to
say about that these days.
The top and the tail
To prepare your gooseberries, wash well with and top and
tail them with sharp scissors or pinching fingernails.
If you have lots of gooseberries, you can do several things.
Pop some straight into freezer bags or stew them with sugar, a little water and
a knob of butter and freeze that. I prefer to make jam or vinegar if I’m going
to preserve them. When they cook, they start to lose their colour and if boiled
very thoroughly, like for jam, they attain a lovely deep pink.
Gooseberry compote is very useful; it can be served simply with ice cream for a quick dessert, or baked in the oven as a pie, crumble or cobbler. A classic dessert is gooseberry fool, simply compote folded into lightly whipped, sweetened cream, or even better a mixture of custard and whipped cream.
A gooseberry haul from just two modestly-sized shrubs
Other desserts include steamed puddings and a delicious baked pudding rather like an Eve’s pudding: I shall be certainly posting a recipe for that. Old fashioned pies called Oldbury tarts made with hot water pastry used to be very popular. Sometimes the pies were filled with red or whitecurrant jelly, just like an old-fashioned raised pork pie – I bet they would be great served with cheese.
I cannot talk about the culinary potential of gooseberries
without mentioning elderflowers. I love their delicious sweet-musk scent and
add it to anything I possibly can. Back in the days of the restaurant, I made
an excellent elderflower blancmange with gooseberry compote and shortbread
biscuits, and I must say it was one of the best desserts I’ve ever made.
To add an elderflower air to your gooseberry dishes simply
tie up a few heads in muslin before dunking them in your gooseberries or whatever.
In the next few posts, I’ll show you some of the recipes I
have mentioned above, just in case you get a glut of them or spy a punnet in
the greengrocers.
British Food: A History 