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Dessert

Very Fine Gooseberry Jam

A jam made from seeded gooseberries, gooseberry juice, and sugar, boiled until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Gooseberry and sugar work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 131 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Very Fine Gooseberry Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Seed the gooseberries and scoop out the pulp.

  2. Combine the pulp with some whole gooseberries in a pot.

  3. Stir over medium heat to extract the juice.

  4. Strain the mixture and weigh the juice.

Cook the jam

  1. Pour 2 lbs of juice into the pot with 4 lbs of seeded gooseberries.

  2. Boil gently for 25 minutes.

  3. Add 14 oz of sugar for each pound of fruit and juice.

  4. Stir until dissolved.

  5. Boil the mixture for an additional 12 to 15 minutes.

  6. Skim off any foam.

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. Gooseberry + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together131 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
Provide the fruit body and natural pectin that helps the jam set.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and, with the pectin and acid, helps it thicken and set.
Gooseberry juice
Adds extra liquid, pectin and acidity to help the jam set.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for the full 12 to 15 minutes after the sugar dissolves. Pectin and sugar set only when the mixture reaches the right concentration, so a short boil can leave the jam runny and a long one can make it stiff.

“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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