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Gooseberry Sauce

A sauce made from gooseberries, melted butter, and optional ginger, lemon peel, or fennel, served with mackerel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and fennel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 723 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Gooseberry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pick and scald the gooseberries.

  2. Drain them on a fine sieve.

  3. Combine the gooseberries with melted butter.

  4. Optionally, add grated ginger, lemon peel, or minced fennel.

  5. Serve the sauce with mackerel.

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. Lemon + fenneltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together723 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Ginger + fenneltop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together253 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Butter + gingertop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,152 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Gooseberries
Provide the tart, fruity flavour that sharpens the rich butter.
Melted butter
Adds richness and a smooth, pourable body to the sauce.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, lemon, fennel):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lemon, fennel. 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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