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Dessert

Very Fine Gooseberry Jam

A jam made from seeded gooseberries, gooseberry juice, and sugar, boiled until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Gooseberry and sugar work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 131 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Very Fine Gooseberry Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Seed the larger rough red gooseberries.

  2. Scoop out the pulp.

  3. Combine the pulp with whole gooseberries in a pot.

  4. Stir over medium heat to extract the juice.

  5. Strain the mixture.

  6. Weigh the juice.

Cook the jam

  1. Add 2 lbs of juice to 4 lbs of seeded gooseberries.

  2. Boil gently for 25 minutes.

  3. Add 14 oz of sugar for each pound of fruit and juice.

  4. Stir until dissolved.

  5. Boil the mixture for an additional 12 to 15 minutes.

  6. Skim off any foam.

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 + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together131 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Gooseberries
Provide the fruit body, natural pectin and tart flavour that give the jam its set and character.
Gooseberry juice
Adds liquid and extracted pectin so the fruit breaks down and the jam can set.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and, with boiling, helps it thicken and set while preserving it.

The step that matters

Boiling until the jam sets. Sugar and pectin only gel when the mixture reaches a high enough concentration at a rolling boil. Stopping too early leaves runny jam, while boiling too long can dull flavour and weaken the set.

“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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