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Gooseberry Sauce

A sauce made from boiled gooseberries, sorrel or spinach, butter, pepper, salt, and sugar, served with fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorrel and pepper work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 419 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Gooseberry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the purée

  1. Boil the gooseberries until soft.

  2. Drain and rub them through a fine sieve.

  3. Stew the purée with chopped sorrel or spinach.

Finish and serve

  1. Add butter, pepper, salt, and sugar.

  2. Serve with fish.

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. Sorrel + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together419 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sorrel + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together652 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Sorrel + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together294 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

Gooseberries
Tart fruit that provides the sharp acidity and body of the sauce once puréed.
Butter
Adds fat that gives the sauce a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
Sugar
Balances the gooseberries' tartness with a touch of sweetness.

The step that matters

Boil the gooseberries until soft. Fully softening the fruit breaks down its cell walls, so rubbing it through a sieve yields a smooth purée. Under-cooked berries stay firm and leave a grainy, lumpy sauce.

Swap the sorrel

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Sorrelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, 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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