Why it works: Butter and flour 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 ↓
Fruit Puddings
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the basin
Grease a basin with butter and line it with a ½ inch thick paste made from flour.
Place half of the gooseberries at the bottom of the basin and sprinkle with half of the sugar.
Add the remaining gooseberries and top with the rest of the sugar.
Fold the paste over the fruit.
Seal the edges well.
Cover with a cloth tied at the bottom.
Boil and serve
Boil in plenty of water for one hour.
Remove from the saucepan. Untie the cloth.
Turn out onto a dish or leave in the basin.
Serve with additional sugar sprinkled on top.
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.
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Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
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Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together98,233 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Butter and flour 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
- All-purpose flour
- Forms the paste that encloses the fruit and holds its shape while boiling.
- Gooseberries
- Supply the tart fruit filling that softens and becomes juicy during boiling.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the tart gooseberries and draws out their juice into a syrup.
- Butter
- Greases the basin so the pudding releases cleanly when turned out.
The step that matters
Seal the edges well. If the paste seam is not sealed tightly, water can enter during boiling and the fruit juice can leak out, leaving a soggy or diluted pudding.
“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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