Skip to main content
Dessert

Gooseberry Fool

A dessert of cooked gooseberries mixed with sugar, water, custard, and topped with frothed cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Gooseberry Fool

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook the gooseberries

  1. Remove the stems and blossoms from the gooseberries.

  2. Place the gooseberries in a saucepan with their weight in sugar and a little water.

  3. Cook until soft, then pass the mixture through a sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Once cooled, mix in enough boiled custard to achieve a thick cream consistency.

  2. Transfer to a glass bowl and top with frothed cream.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Green gooseberries
Provide the tart flavour and, once cooked and sieved, the fruit pulp that forms the base.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the fruit and balances its sharp tartness.
Boiled custard
Thickens the purée and adds richness and a smooth, creamy body.
Frothed cream
Adds fat and a light, airy texture on top of the dessert.

The step that matters

Let the fruit cool before adding the custard. Egg custard can curdle or turn grainy when it meets very hot fruit. Cooling the sieved purée first lets the custard blend in smoothly and thicken evenly.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes