Gluts are the least romantic part of seasonal cooking. A grower rings on a Tuesday to say the gooseberries have all come at once and would we like forty kilos, and the honest answer is that we would like eight kilos a week for five weeks, which is not on offer. So you take the forty and you have about four days.
The three destinations
Everything that arrives in a glut goes to one of three places: vinegar, ferment or freezer. Vinegar is the best of the three because it improves with time rather than merely surviving it — the gooseberry vinegar we dip the samphire in was made in a June two years ago and is better now than it was then.
- Vinegar: fruit, sugar, a mother, and eight months of being ignored in the cellar.
- Ferment: salt at two per cent, a weight, and a check every other day for the first fortnight.
- Freezer: only for fruit that is going straight into a purée. Texture never survives; flavour usually does.
The fourth destination, which nobody writes about, is the staff meal. Forty kilos of anything means the brigade eats it for a week, and that is how you find out which of the three methods was actually worth doing.
