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Dessert

Gooseberry Pie

A fruit pie made with gooseberries, sugar, flour, butter, and light, rich pie dough.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Gooseberry Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Line pie tins with light, rich pie dough.

Make the filling

  1. Stew gooseberries until soft.

  2. In a bowl, mix sugar and flour together.

  3. Add the sugar and flour mixture to the stewed gooseberries.

  4. Dot the mixture with butter.

Bake

  1. Cover with a top crust and bake until golden brown.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 base and most of the filling's body and flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart gooseberries and balances their acidity.
Flour
Thickens the cooking juices so the filling sets rather than running out.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the filling, rounding out the tartness.
Light, rich pie dough
Forms the structure that holds the filling and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Mix the sugar and flour before adding them to the gooseberries. Flour added directly to hot fruit tends to form lumps and cook unevenly. Mixing it with sugar first separates the starch grains so they disperse through the filling and thicken it 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.

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