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Dessert

Modern Cookery

A baked gooseberry bread made with bread crumbs, eggs, biscuits, butter, and cooked gooseberries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the base

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, combine bread crumbs and whisked eggs.

  3. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake gently for 30 to 45 minutes.

Make the gooseberry purée

  1. In a saucepan, cook green gooseberries with sugar and water for 10 to 12 minutes until soft.

  2. Work the fruit through a sieve, mix with crushed biscuits, and add double the butter.

Combine and bake

  1. Combine all ingredients and bake as directed.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Bread + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together319 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Biscuit + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,009 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Sugar + biscuittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the crumbs and set into a tender, sliceable structure when heated.
Bread crumbs
Provide the body of the base, absorbing liquid and giving the bread its structure.
Green gooseberries
Supply tartness and fruit flavour, along with moisture from their juice.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart gooseberries and helps the fruit soften during cooking.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, more tender crumb.

The step that matters

Bake the egg and crumb base gently. Eggs set and turn rubbery or curdle when exposed to high heat. A gentle oven lets the egg proteins set evenly, giving a smooth, tender base.

“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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