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Gooseberry Sauce

A sauce made from cooked gooseberries, butter, flour, milk, sugar, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Gooseberry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gooseberry puree

  1. Add gooseberries to a saucepan with barely enough water to cover the bottom.

  2. Cook slowly until the gooseberries are tender.

  3. Rub the cooked gooseberries through a fine sieve to make a puree.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook until the mixture thickens.

  3. Add the milk and stir until it boils.

  4. Add the gooseberry puree and sugar.

  5. Heat the mixture through.

  6. 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Green gooseberries
Provide the tart fruit base that is cooked down and sieved into the puree.
Butter
Melts with the flour to form the base of the sauce, adding richness.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with the melted butter.
Milk
Forms the liquid of the sauce, which thickens as it comes to the boil.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart gooseberry puree.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour and cook until the mixture thickens. Cooking the flour with the melted butter until it thickens cooks out its raw taste and lets it swell and thicken the sauce evenly once the milk is added. Stopping too early leaves a floury taste and a thin sauce.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, 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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