Green Gooseberries: The Cooking Fruit of Late May

The green gooseberries on the bush in May are not a failed version of the dessert berry. They are a different fruit with a different purpose: hard, sour, the size of a small marble, the right side of acid for cooking. The dessert gooseberries come in July, soft and sweet enough to eat off the stem. The cooking ones come in May, ten weeks earlier, and the third week of May is their moment. Eliza Acton in 1845 set down the standard farmhouse method, and the fool below is from her tradition: tart fruit, cream, and a measured note of elderflower.

A cooking fruit

The unripe gooseberry has a high acid content (mostly citric and malic) and a flesh that breaks down to a translucent green pulp when cooked, holding its colour and flavour through quite hard heat. It is the wrong fruit to eat raw and the right one to bake into tarts, stew with sugar for compotes, fold into custards, or bottle for the year. English cooks from the seventeenth century onward grew gooseberries specifically for this earlier crop, and the bushes were planted to ripen in succession: green in May, slightly riper in June, fully ripe and sweet in July. A working kitchen garden in 1850 would expect three uses for the same bushes across three months.

Acton 1845: the farmhouse method

Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families of 1845 gives the standard farmhouse method for green gooseberries: top and tail the berries, stew them very slowly with a little water until they just pop, layer the thick translucent green filling between sweet pastry with heavy spoonfuls of sugar, and bake until set. The acidity of the unripe fruit was the whole point – Acton's readers wanted a tart that cut through the cream poured over it. The book was the standard British domestic cookery text for the second half of the nineteenth century and remained in print until the 1920s.

Gooseberry and elderflower fool

Ingredients: 1 lb green gooseberries, topped and tailed; 100g caster sugar; 3 tbsp elderflower cordial; 300ml double cream; 4 meringue nests, crushed.

Method: Cook the gooseberries with the sugar and elderflower cordial in a wide pan over a medium heat until the fruit collapses, eight to ten minutes. Cool the compote completely. Whip the double cream to soft peaks. Fold in the gooseberry compote and the crushed meringue nests. Spoon into glasses and serve. Serves four.

The pairing of green gooseberries with elderflower is old. The fruit comes in just as the elder begins to flower, and the two together carry the smell of late May into the bowl at the same moment.

Bottling for the year

Green gooseberries bottle better than almost any other fruit. The method is the standard Kilner-jar one: top and tail two pounds, pack them into sterilised jars to within an inch of the top, cover with a hot syrup of one part sugar to two parts water, seal, and process in a water bath at simmering point for twenty-five minutes. Stored somewhere cool and dark they keep for at least a year, and come out of the jar tasting of the May they were picked in. The bottled fruit is the ingredient for a December gooseberry crumble or a January pudding.

Yorkshire and the Pennine growers

The English centre of gooseberry growing has been Yorkshire and the surrounding Pennine valleys since the late eighteenth century. The Goostrey, Egton Bridge, and Catshill Gooseberry Shows have been running for over two hundred years, and the cultivars they preserve include some of the largest gooseberries ever recorded (the world record stands at over two ounces for a single berry). The Pennine growers bottle their green fruit by tradition every May. The technique was carried out into the wider country by their families and survives in a few farmhouse kitchens still.

Sources: Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845); Jane Grigson, Jane Grigson's Fruit Book (1982); RHS species note: Ribes uva-crispa.