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Dessert

Gooseberry Cream

A chilled dessert made from gooseberry puree, lemon juice, sugar, vanilla cream, and spinach coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Gooseberry and spinach share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Gooseberry Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the puree

  1. Cook the gooseberries in a saucepan until tender.

  2. Pass the cooked gooseberries through a fine sieve and sweeten to taste.

Make the cream

  1. Prepare the cream as directed, omitting the vanilla flavoring.

  2. Combine the gooseberry puree with a few drops of spinach coloring.

  3. Pour the mixture into a prepared mold.

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. Gooseberry + spinachtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together18 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lemon + spinachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Gooseberry + vanillatop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Gooseberry puree
Provides the main fruit flavor and the tart base of the cream.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the gooseberry flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the puree and balances its tartness.
Vanilla cream
Supplies the rich, fatty body that gives the dessert its creamy texture.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (gooseberry, sugar, vanilla, cream, spinach):

  1. Cherryfits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against gooseberry, sugar, vanilla, cream, spinach. 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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