Ingredient

Gooseberry

Gooseberries come in two guises that behave almost like different fruits. Early green ones are hard and mouth-puckeringly sour and are picked for cooking; late dessert varieties are soft, red or golden, and sweet enough to eat off the bush. Buying the wrong one for the job is the commonest gooseberry mistake.

Two fruits, one name

The green cooking gooseberry is picked hard in late May and June. It holds its shape briefly then bursts, it is intensely acidic, and it is what a fool, a crumble or a sauce for mackerel is made from. Sugar is not optional with it.

The dessert gooseberry ripens through July into August, going red, purple or amber, and softens considerably. It is sweet, faintly musky, and best eaten raw. Cooked, it loses most of what makes it worth having.

Both have a papery, slightly hairy skin. In cooking this disappears; raw, on a hard green one, it is unpleasant, which is another reason the two are not interchangeable.

Topping and tailing without losing an afternoon

Each berry keeps a stalk at one end and a dried flower at the other, and both are traditionally removed.

1. For anything being sieved or strained, skip it entirely. It all comes out later.
2. For a fool or a compote that gets crushed, skip it too. The remnants are small and soften completely.
3. For a crumble, a jam with whole fruit, or anything where texture matters, do it — pinch each end off with your fingernails, or snip with small scissors.
4. Freezing first makes the ends snap off cleanly, and gooseberries freeze extremely well.
5. Do not bother peeling. Nobody peels a gooseberry.

How it behaves in the pan

High pectin

Especially in under-ripe green fruit. Gooseberry jam sets readily and gooseberry is a good rescue fruit for a jam that will not.

High acid

No lemon needed. The acidity is the point.

It bursts

Green gooseberries hold their shape for a few minutes then collapse suddenly. If you want whole fruit in the finished dish, take the pan off early.

It turns pink

Green gooseberries cooked long enough go a dusty pink. This is normal and not a fault.

Sugar late

As with currants, adding sugar before the skins soften keeps them tough.

What to do with them

• Gooseberry fool. Crushed cooked fruit folded through whipped cream and custard. The classic and still the best.
• With mackerel. A sharp gooseberry sauce with an oily fish is a genuine British pairing, and it works for the same reason apple works with pork.
• With elderflower. The seasons overlap by a few weeks and the pairing is close to perfect — a splash of cordial in a gooseberry compote transforms it.
• Crumble, which needs less sugar than most people use and benefits from a bit of ground almond in the topping.
• Jam or jelly, which sets with no assistance whatsoever.
• Chutney, where the acidity means less vinegar is needed than usual.
• Dessert varieties raw, with nothing on them, which is a genuinely rare pleasure and almost impossible to buy.

Common questions