Name: Gooseberry Fool
Ingredients: 1 quart ripe gooseberries; 1 cup water; 1 heaping teaspoon butter; 1 cup sugar; 3 egg yolks; sugar for meringue (to taste)

Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Gooseberry Fool

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

Cut off the blossoms and stems from the gooseberries.
Stew the gooseberries in water until tender.
Run the mixture through a colander to remove skins.

Make the fool

Stir in butter, sugar, and beaten egg yolks.

Finish and serve

Pour into a serving dish and cover with meringue made from beaten egg whites and sugar.
Serve cold.

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.

Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together122,807 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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 flavour and the pulp that forms the base of the dish.
Sugar: Sweetens the tart fruit and adds body to the purée.
Egg yolks: Enrich the purée and give it a thick, custard-like texture.
Egg whites: Whipped with sugar to form the meringue topping that adds airy lightness.
Butter: Adds richness and a smoother mouthfeel to the fruit mixture.

The step that matters

Run the mixture through a colander to remove skins. Skins left in the purée make the fool gritty and tough to eat. Pressing the stewed fruit through a colander separates the pulp from the skins and seeds, giving the smooth texture the dish depends on.

“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.