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Gooseberry Sauce for Green Geese

A sauce made from sorrel, butter, flour, green gooseberries, and optional cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorrel and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 231 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Gooseberry Sauce for Green Geese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the sorrel and press out the juice using a cloth.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, then add the flour and sorrel juice instead of water.

  2. Cook until the sauce is very thick.

  3. Scald the green gooseberries until tender and add them to the sauce.

  4. If not sweetened, add cayenne pepper to taste.

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 + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Melted with flour to form the base of the thickened sauce, adding richness.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the liquid, giving it body.
Sorrel leaves
Their juice supplies the liquid and the sharp, sour flavour of the sauce.
Green gooseberries
Add tartness and fruit body once softened in the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook until the sauce is very thick. Flour thickens only when its starch granules swell in hot liquid and stay in contact with it long enough. Stopping early leaves a thin, starchy sauce, while the flour needs to cook through to lose its raw taste.

Swap the sorrel

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper. 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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