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Dessert

Gooseberry Pie

A fruit pie made with gooseberries, sugar, flour, butter, and pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter 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 ↓

Gooseberry Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Fill the pie

  1. Line a deep dish with pie crust.

  2. Fill the dish with gooseberries.

  3. Adjust the sugar based on the sweetness of the gooseberries, using at least 1 cup.

  4. Sift 1 teaspoon of flour over the gooseberries.

  5. Add a small amount of butter.

Bake

  1. Cover with another pie crust and bake until golden.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter 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

Gooseberries
Provide the tart fruit that forms the filling and its acidity.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart fruit and balances its sourness.
Flour
Absorbs fruit juices and thickens the filling as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that softens the filling's flavour.
Pie crust
Forms the structure that holds the filling and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Adjust the sugar to the gooseberries. Gooseberries range from very tart to sweet, and sugar balances their acidity. Too little leaves the pie sour, while too much makes it cloying and can thin the set of the juices.

“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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