Name: Gooseberry Sauce
Ingredients: 2 handfuls half-ripe gooseberries; ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt; 2 tablespoons velouté sauce; 2 tablespoons butter; salt to taste; pepper to taste; nutmeg to taste; fennel (optional)

Why it works: Nutmeg and fennel share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 96 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Gooseberry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Open the gooseberries and remove the seeds.
Blanch the gooseberries in a little salt and water, then drain them.

Make the sauce

In a saucepan, mix the velouté and butter sauces and heat them.
Add the gooseberries to the saucepan and stir well.
Season the sauce with salt, pepper, and nutmeg to taste.

Serve

Serve the sauce with boiled mackerel, adding fennel if desired.

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.

Nutmeg + fenneltop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together96 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together13,015 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + fenneltop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,216 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Sauce + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together15,338 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together24,377 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Sauce and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Gooseberries: Provide tart, acidic flavour that cuts the richness of the sauce and the fish.
Velouté sauce: Gives the sauce body and thickness as a starch-thickened base.
Butter: Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the sauce.