Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓
Fruit Puddings
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the basin
Butter a basin and line it with pastry, rolling it to ½ inch thick.
Place half of the gooseberries at the bottom of the basin.
Sprinkle half of the sugar over the gooseberries.
Add the remaining gooseberries and top with the rest of the sugar.
Draw the pastry over the filling, sealing the edges well.
Boil and serve
Cover with a cloth, tying it at the bottom, and boil in plenty of water for 1 hour.
Remove from the saucepan, untie the cloth, and turn out onto a dish or leave in the basin.
Serve with sugar sprinkled on top.
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
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.
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Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together98,233 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Gooseberries
- Provide the tart fruit filling that becomes soft and juicy during boiling.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the gooseberries and balances their natural tartness.
- Pastry
- Forms the outer case that holds the fruit and sugar together during boiling.
The step that matters
Sealing the pastry over the filling. If the edges are not sealed well, juices can escape and leak into the boiling water, leaving the pudding dry and the filling thin. A tight seal keeps the steam and juices inside the pastry as it cooks.
“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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