Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓
Gooseberry Fool
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the fruit
Remove the stalks from the gooseberries.
Place the gooseberries in a clean saucepan with the sugar and add ½ pint of water.
Boil gently for 30 minutes.
Make the pulp
Rub the mixture through a fine sieve and chill the pulp in the ice.
Taste and add more sugar if needed.
Finish and serve
Whip the cream and mix it with the fruit pulp just before serving.
Serve in small ice glasses or a glass dish with fancy biscuits or sponge fingers.
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.
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Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together43,450 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Gooseberries
- Provide the tart fruit flavour and the pulp that forms the body of the fool.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the tart gooseberries and balances their acidity.
- Cream
- Whipped, it adds richness and a light, airy texture to the pulp.
The step that matters
Boil gently for 30 minutes. Gentle heat softens the gooseberries so they break down into pulp without scorching on the bottom of the pan. Sugar dissolved in the fruit also sweetens it evenly. Vigorous boiling can burn the sugar and make the fruit taste bitter.
“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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