Skip to main content
Sauce

Green Gooseberry Sauce for Boiled Mackerel

A sauce made from green gooseberries, green sorrel, butter, sugar, pepper, salt, and nutmeg, served hot with boiled mackerel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sorrel and nutmeg share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 89 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Green Gooseberry Sauce for Boiled Mackerel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the green sorrel and press out the juice through a cloth.

  2. Boil the green gooseberries, drain them, and rub them through a sieve.

Make and serve the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the sorrel juice with the gooseberry pulp, butter, sugar, pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

  2. Heat the sauce until very hot and serve in a tureen.

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. Sorrel + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together89 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Sorrel + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together419 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Sorrel + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together652 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 fruit pulp that forms the body and sharp flavour of the sauce.
Green sorrel
Adds a sour, lemony acidity and fresh green flavour to the sauce.
Sugar
Balances the sourness of the gooseberries and sorrel with sweetness.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.

Swap the sorrel

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, pepper, nutmeg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Sorrelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, pepper, nutmeg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes