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Dessert

Gooseberry Pudding

A sweet pudding made from gooseberries, sugar, cinnamon, blanched almonds, and thickened with potato flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Gooseberry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Stem and pick off the flowers from the gooseberries, then wash them.

  2. Cover the gooseberries with water and cook until tender.

  3. Strain the cooked gooseberries through a sieve.

Thicken and serve

  1. Return the puree to the fire and bring it to a boil.

  2. Sweeten to taste and flavor with cinnamon and finely chopped blanched almonds.

  3. Add 1 tablespoon of potato flour for every quart of puree to thicken.

  4. Mould the pudding and serve.

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. Cinnamon + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Almond + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Almond + potatotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together337 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 the bulk of the pudding's puree.
Potato flour
Thickens the hot puree so it sets into a firm, moulded pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart gooseberry puree to taste.
Blanched almonds
Add nutty flavor and a slight texture to the puree.

The step that matters

Adding the potato flour. Starch thickens only when heated in liquid and it can clump if added to cold puree. Stirring it in while the puree is boiling helps it disperse evenly and thicken into a smooth, settable pudding.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cinnamon, almond, flour):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cinnamon, almond, flour. 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.

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