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Dessert

Gooseberry Fool

A dessert made from simmered gooseberries, sugar, water, mashed and strained, mixed with Swiss milk and served chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Gooseberry Fool

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Top and tail the gooseberries.

  2. Place them in an enamelled saucepan with the sugar and water.

  3. Simmer until quite tender.

Make the fool

  1. Mash to a pulp and strain through a wire sieve or colander.

  2. Once cold, mix thoroughly with the Swiss milk.

  3. Serve in a glass dish or custard glasses.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

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.

  1. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 pulp that gives the fool its main flavour and acidity.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and balances the gooseberries' sharp tartness as they cook.
Swiss milk
Adds richness and a creamy body to the cooled fruit pulp.

The step that matters

Let the pulp cool before adding the Swiss milk. Mixing the milk into warm fruit pulp can thin the dairy and make the texture grainy or separate. Cooling the pulp first keeps the fool smooth and thick.

“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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