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Dessert

Gooseberry Cakes

A cake made from mashed gooseberries, powdered sugar, and egg white, dried in the sun.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Gooseberry Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pulp

  1. Pick over the gooseberries and discard any that are not sound.

  2. Place the gooseberries in a pitcher and set it in a kettle of boiling water.

  3. Mash the gooseberries with a wooden spoon until they can be easily strained through a sieve.

Make the mixture

  1. Combine the gooseberry pulp, powdered sugar, and beaten egg white in a bowl.

  2. Whisk the mixture for three hours until well combined.

Dry and serve

  1. Drop small amounts of the mixture onto writing paper.

  2. Dry the cakes in the sun.

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. 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 fruit pulp that gives the cakes their flavour and tartness.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the mixture and helps it hold its shape as it dries.
Egg white
Adds protein that binds the pulp and sugar into a cohesive mass.

The step that matters

Whisking the mixture. Whisking for a long time incorporates air and dissolves sugar into the pulp, so the mixture must be beaten until fully combined and smooth before dropping, or the cakes may spread unevenly or stay grainy.

“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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