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Dessert

Gooseberry Cream

A chilled gooseberry custard made with fresh berries, wine, cinnamon, lemon, eggs, and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Gooseberry Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gooseberries

  1. Boil the gooseberries with wine, cinnamon, and lemon peel until soft.

  2. Press the mixture through a fine sieve.

Make the cream

  1. Beat the egg yolks with powdered sugar, wine, and gooseberry juice until light.

  2. Stir the mixture over low heat until it boils.

  3. Quickly fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

  4. Pour into glasses and chill on ice until ready to 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 + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Lemon + gooseberrytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together40 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Cinnamon + gooseberrytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Cinnamon and sugar 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 main fruit flavour and, once pressed, the body of the cream.
Egg yolks
Thicken the mixture as they cook gently and add richness.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff foam, they lighten the cream and give it an airy texture.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the cream and dissolves easily into the beaten yolks.
Gooseberry juice
Adds tart fruit flavour and liquid to the yolk custard.

The step that matters

Stir the yolk mixture over low heat until it boils. Egg yolks thicken as they cook, but if the heat is too high they can scramble and turn grainy. Gentle, steady stirring keeps the custard smooth.

Swap the gooseberry

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (wine, cinnamon, lemon, egg, sugar):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Gooseberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wine, cinnamon, lemon, egg, sugar. 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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