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Dessert

Gooseberry Sauce

A sauce made from simmered gooseberries with sorrel juice, ginger, butter, optional sugar or parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorrel and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 234 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Gooseberry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Put the gooseberries in cold water.

  2. Set them on the fire and let them simmer until tender.

  3. Drain the gooseberries and add sorrel juice, ginger, and melted butter.

  4. Use melted butter and sugar only for a sweeter version.

  5. Add chopped boiled parsley.

  6. Serve immediately.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together234 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Ginger + parsleytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together676 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Sorrel + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Gooseberries
Provide the main fruit body and tart flavour that the sauce is built on.
Melted butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy mouthfeel to the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the sharpness of the gooseberries in the sweeter version.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sorrel, ginger, butter, 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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