Skip to main content
Main

Gooseberry Sauce, for Mackerel

A sauce made from boiled gooseberries mixed with melted butter and optional seasonings, served warm with mackerel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Gooseberry Sauce, for Mackerel

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gooseberries

  1. Cut the tops and stalks from the gooseberries.

  2. Boil the gooseberries until tender.

  3. Press them through a sieve.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the strained gooseberries with the melted butter.

  2. Add any optional seasonings to taste.

  3. Serve the sauce warm.

  4. Mash the gooseberries and serve without butter.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Nutmeg + sorreltop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together89 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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 base and bulk of the sauce once cooked and sieved.
Melted butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the puréed fruit.
Pounded sugar
Balances the sharp acidity of the gooseberries with sweetness.

The step that matters

Press them through a sieve. Gooseberry skins and seeds stay behind when the cooked fruit is pressed through a sieve. Pressing gives a smooth sauce; skipping it leaves the texture coarse and stringy.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, lemon, nutmeg, sugar, pepper, sorrel):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lemon, nutmeg, sugar, pepper, sorrel. 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.

More gooseberry sauce recipes

Green 3 See all 64 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesSorrel SoupSorrel Soup23 recipesSorrel SaladSorrel Salad9 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes