Name: Gooseberry Vinegar
Ingredients: 5 pints cold water; 1 quart ripe gooseberry pulp; 1.5 pounds good moist sugar

Why it works: Gooseberry and sugar work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 131 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Gooseberry Vinegar

Ingredients

5 pints cold water
1 quart ripe gooseberry pulp
1.5 pounds good moist sugar

Directions

Prepare the liquid

Bruise the ripe gooseberries well.
Mix the gooseberry pulp with 5 pints of cold water and let it sit for 2 days, stirring daily.
Strain the mixture through a sieve, then through a flannel bag.

Sweeten and store

Dissolve 1.5 pounds of sugar in the strained liquid.
Pour the vinegar into a cask or large stone jar and cover it tightly.

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.

Gooseberry + sugartop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together131 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Gooseberry pulp: Provides the fruit flavour and the natural acids that turn the liquid into vinegar.
Sugar: Feeds the fermentation and adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Cold water: Dilutes the pulp and provides the liquid medium in which fermentation takes place.

“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.