Skip to main content
Dessert

Gooseberry Turnovers

A pastry filled with stewed gooseberries and sugar, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Gooseberry Turnovers

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Prepare a good light crust and roll it out to ¼ inch thickness.

  2. Cut rounds using a cup, plate, or small basin.

Fill and bake

  1. Place a few stewed gooseberries with sugar on one half of each round.

  2. Fold the other half over the fruit and seal the edges securely.

  3. Bake on buttered tins in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for about 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve on a napkin with sifted sugar.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Good light crust
Forms the pastry shell that encloses the fruit and bakes crisp and flaky.
Gooseberries
Provide the tart fruit filling that contrasts with the sweetness of the sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart gooseberries and adds sweetness to the finished turnovers.
Butter
Greases the tins so the turnovers release cleanly and brown evenly.

The step that matters

Seal the edges securely. If the edges are not sealed tightly, juice from the stewed gooseberries can leak out during baking, leaving the turnovers dry and the pastry soggy on the tin.

“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