Name: Gooseberry Pool
Ingredients: 6 oz. gooseberries; ½ cup water; sugar to taste; 1 tablespoon cream; rusks for serving

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Gooseberry Pool

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the gooseberries in ½ cup of water until soft enough to pulp.
Add sugar to taste and rub the fruit through a sieve.
Let the mixture cool, then mix in the cream.
Serve with rusks.

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.

Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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 that softens and pulps into the pudding's body.
Cream: Adds richness and a smoother, softer mouthfeel to the pulped fruit.
Sugar: Sweetens the tart gooseberries to balance their acidity.

“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.